In the Flesh: The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)

If Mike Flanagan didn’t suffer from such a pressing need to feed us a spoonful of treacle along with every pound of glass and rusty nails he dishes up in The Fall of the House of Usher, he might have had something pretty close to perfect pulp. Instead we must content ourselves with a series fundamentally, if only slightly, flawed from its inception, a hard-hearted retelling of A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge refuses again and again to learn the lessons time and Death and love would teach him, but one which flinches away from its own nastiness at critical moments. The ill-gotten riches of Purdue Pharma stand-in Fortunato Pharmaceuticals are, we’re assured, put to better use by the selfless heirs of its repugnant founders. Those riches save lives, free addicts from their dependency, spirit battered women away from murderous husbands — a veritable landslide of goodness and rightness and justice carried out by conscientious billionaires whose hard-knock lives prepared them to make the right choices when they found themselves at the reins. It’s a sickening pinch of sugar in a perfectly good bowl of chicken soup.

But set that aside. Set aside the inevitable handful Flanagan monologue misfires — both fewer and less egregiously overwritten than in past series — and safe, boring swipes at Trump and you’re left with something really, truly mean, a version of Succession where episodes end with the Roy siblings dying nasty karmic deaths and along the way we’re treated to engrossing performances, some genuinely hot sex and sexuality, and a refreshing bone-deep contempt for the super rich. Bruce Greenwood’s turn as Roderick Usher alone is worth the price of admission, a monster you might mistake for ruthless and powerful until it gradually becomes clear he lives in a state of constant avoidance, fleeing from and subverting every chance at meaningful connection he comes across until his whole empire rolls up like a vinyl window blind and takes his legacy with it. Then there’s Willa Fitzgerald as a twenty-something Madeline Usher, a steely femme fatale so palpably broken as a human being that it’s hard to look directly at her, and Mark Hammill doing career best work as ruthless family fixer and attorney Arthur Gordon Pym.

It’s a fun show, and it largely meets the high standard Flanagan set himself for set design and shot composition in Midnight Mass. There are a few bum costuming choices, a few dodgy CGI shots. There’s also something lost, I think, in interpreting Poe’s Gothic themes through the lens of American business culture. Flanagan’s cutting here, but much of the evil of business is achieved in absentia, through inaction and avoidance. Fall isn’t an adaptation so much as it is a mean-spirited Faustian fairy tale in the key of Poe, but even so there’s something inherently less compelling about the character of dissolution in the boardroom than there is about the dripping, incestuous carcass of aristocratic excess. It’s not that I need to see Bruce Greenwood and Mary McDonnell bone down (though I wouldn’t object) to understand they’re rotten people, it’s that there’s a certain sensual element missing from the wrongdoing Flanagan’s showing us, a meatiness he stops just short of putting on the screen. It’s there in moments. The cut from Freddie (Henry Thomas) taking a pair of pliers to his wife’s teeth to a box of Altoids Mints clattering faintly as he places it on a table that’s just dripping with that missing ingredient, but when it comes to Roderick and Madeline themselves, we’re left largely with their words and not their deeds. It’s a good show. A great one, occasionally. A pity about those pulled punches.