Mike Flanagan’s Poe mashup kills a pharmaceutical dynasty one episode at a time, and it is handsome, gory and often good fun, and Bruce Greenwood is superb. But it shouts where Poe whispered, and the game of spot-the-reference wears thin before the house comes down.
Mike Flanagan’s eight-part series moves Edgar Allan Poe’s doomed family into the boardroom of a pharmaceutical company. Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) has built a fortune on a painkiller and has buried his six children in a fortnight. He summons the investigator who has spent a career failing to convict him to the ruined house where the Ushers grew up, and tells him how it happened. Each episode borrows the title of a Poe story or poem and uses it to kill an Usher. It is handsome, gory and often good fun, and a good deal less than it means to be.
Greenwood holds the whole thing up. He plays Roderick as a man grieving and lying in the same breath. His speech about how a salesman would sell the world a lemon is the best written stretch in the series. Carla Gugino’s Verna turns up in a different guise to each child, and Gugino gives every one of them the same unhurried curiosity. Mary McDonnell’s Madeline is dry, hard and unrepentant. Rahul Kohli and Kate Siegel get the sharpest lines.
Michael Fimognari, who shoots the series and shares the directing with Flanagan, keeps the confession in near darkness, rain on the windows and one lamp between two men, and gives the children a world of glass, white walls and blue screens. Laurin Kelsey’s childhood house has damp climbing the wallpaper; the penthouses look as if nobody has ever sat down in them. Terry Anderson dresses each sibling in a colour of their own. Andrew Grush and Taylor Stewart’s score keeps out of the way of the talk and saves itself for the deaths, which are staged slow and brightly lit. Flanagan and Brett W. Bachman cut between confession and past so that a question asked in the present is answered decades earlier.
The trouble is that the Poe references are a game, and the game gets in the way. The children carry Poe names, Camille L’Espanaye, Tamerlane, and so does the boss the young twins work under, Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco), and characters recite whole passages at one another. It is a quiz for people who did the reading, and it sits on top of the drama rather than inside it. Poe’s dread came from one mind in one room; it does not survive eight hours and a dozen people.
The anger thins too. The Ushers are plainly modelled on a real pharmaceutical family, and the series says so more than once. Having said it, it has nowhere to take it, so it says it again. By the fifth episode we knew the shape of an hour: an Usher does something vile, Verna appears, a title is paid off, and we go back to the rain. We were waiting rather than watching.
What got at us was smaller than any of the deaths. One of them made us gasp and laugh in the same second, then wonder whether Flanagan had wanted both or had not decided, and that wobble runs through the series. Catherine Parker’s Annabel Lee, the wife Roderick had before the money, is on screen for a few minutes an episode, and those minutes are the only tender ones in it. When Greenwood’s voice catches on her name, the series is about loss rather than comeuppance, and it is better for it.
Against Flanagan’s own work this is the loud one. The Haunting of Hill House (2018) kept one family in one house and let the fear build; Midnight Mass (2021) also ran on long speeches and earned them, because the people giving them were small and frightened. Here the people are rich and awful and the speeches tell us so. Zach Gilford and Willa Fitzgerald, as the young twins, carry the one strand we wanted more of.
It runs to eight episodes and carries an 18 certificate it has no trouble justifying. Watch it if you like your horror grand, your rich people punished and your poetry quoted at length. Poe brought the house down in a short story. Flanagan takes eight hours, and spends a fair few of them making sure we caught the reference.
