On the threshold of the damned old house, while watching the man feeling unbearably depressed, Deputy Chief Prosecutor Auguste Dupin appears. (Carl Lumbly). Waiting for him inside is his long-time acquaintance and enemy, Roderick Usher, the owner of the Fortunato pharmaceutical company. (Bruce Greenwood). Putting him behind bars became Dupin’s life’s work: It was the Usher family, with their supposedly non-addictive miracle painkillers, who incited the opioid epidemic in the United States, but they somehow incredibly evaded justice for decades. But Asher received a strange measure of justice: in recent weeks, all six of the businessman’s children died under extremely mysterious circumstances and with extremely gruesome deaths. Now Asher finally decides to tell the whole truth about his mysterious life, and Dupin finds answers to all his questions.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” in the press was first called the “gothic “The Heirs”, and in general it is fair: the best horror producer of the last decade, Mike Flanagan, really came out of the well of literature. Edgar Allan Poe from the best series of the last decade It’s a sort of Shakespearean drama about a lost family of incredibly rich people (though Flanagan goes dog-eat-dog on the family material), except that instead of the Murdoch citizens who founded media companies like News Corporation and 21st Century Fox, the Sackler clan is in the crosshairs. and that it made Americans addicted to painkillers (“Ushers”, it seems, is the third series on this topic. this story, not counting documentaries), and there is no shortage of horror and blood in the frame.
Otherwise, it might even be a special wink in some places: Flanagan’s regular composers, the Newton Brothers, for example, occasionally emulate the same classics that Nicholas Britell did on “The Descendants,” suggesting that the family members themselves have a penchant for that style of music. It means. Roev to think of themselves this way. And most importantly: “The Fall of the House of Usher,” like “The Heirs,” essentially consists of a series of forks in which people repeatedly choose not to be human. In a word, “Descendants” is copied with an arrogance worthy of the “Descendants” series, and the result is a kind of cross between “American Horror Story” and “American…” or “…Crime Story”.
This is a Mike Flanagan show, though, and it’s not just about Stephen King repeating from interview to interview his mantra that horror is impossible without love. “The Descendants” is a paradoxical show in a sense, because it seems to work against logic: there are completely disgusting characters in a desperate fight, there is absolutely no one to empathize with, and yet you cannot tear yourself away like a fight between a frog and a viper. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is, of course, something much more soul-saving in this sense: It is not entirely clear what love is, but goodness and justice are present in the series, at least to some extent. (While Flanagan buries the Sacklers alive, making them the nightmares of Poe’s works, none of these people are actually in prison; they haven’t even been charged).
It’s certainly a fitting note to end Flanagan’s love affair with Netflix, which has produced at least three great series ( The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass ). The romance could have continued if the streaming service “Night Owl Club” had not been shut down (the only project designed for several seasons did not even survive the second; also, by some estimates, great), but Raven croaked: “Never” means the contract has expired and Flanagan is moving to Amazon. At the same time, “The Fall of the House of Usher” completes a trilogy of adaptations of classic horror literature connected to real estate in one way or another: “House on the Hill” was based on Shirley Jackson, while “Bly Manor” was based on Henry James (“ Although “Midnight Rite” inspired King, it is ultimately an original project, and “The Nighthawks Club” prompted Christopher Pike’s modern young adult film), now it’s the turn of “The House of Usher.”
Simply beautiful, especially in the case of the Bailiffs, it seems like a particularly masterful job has been done. Flanagan, as always, is sophisticated about the musicality of the English language (ah, those monologues) and, in a room with a carefully tuned microclimate, interacts with other people’s material as if wearing special gloves. His patchwork method (not an adaptation of one work at a time, but rather a witty mash-up) is a risky thing, because if he fails he risks being inundated with curses from fans (plus this is a bloc of literature in general, not just horror literature). But skill, as they say, cannot be drunk (the horror producer, among other things, managed to cope with alcohol addiction).
Its combination of prose, poetry, and even fragments of Poe’s biography is perhaps the most delicate, respectful, and attentive framework with which the author’s legacy has been touched since the publication of his works (let us not be afraid of such a framework – and so be Tim Burton). forgive us). In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Flanagan does the unthinkable: he introduces a critique of capitalism into Poe’s texts, describing it (capitalism) not only as a monstrous, unnatural system, but also as a very specific set of decisions. Our children will have to pay for it, of course they will be better than us, but it seems they will inherit a much scarier world. Amazingly, this is done completely flawlessly, as if Poe had written it himself. But what is there to talk about: This man managed to knit the monkey in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, which should not raise any questions. Isn’t that skill?