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Furthermore, the house, despite holding together as a totality, shows signs of physical decay, like crumbling stones, dead trees, and mushrooms growing from the masonry. Madeline herself is dying of a wasting disease, showing physical deterioration. Perhaps the most obvious parallel lies in the initially shallow crack in the manor, representing the impending destruction of the house. Because the last of the Usher line are twins, that the crack divides the house in two signals their eternal separation in death. Costumes and hair, incidentally, are a huge part of the characterizations in this show, from Greenwood’s mustache to Thomas’ disturbing man-bun.
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The Fall of the House of Usher movie review (2023) - Roger Ebert
The Fall of the House of Usher movie review ( .
Posted: Thu, 12 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Whatever level you’re at, it’s a formula for a series of moment-to-moment effectiveness, with some cleverness and much playful horror. But in its wish-fulfillment approach to a very real tragedy, the haunting here is more fleeting and less marrow-deep than Flanagan’s best work. I trust you see what Flanagan, who wrote or co-wrote nearly every episode and directed much of the series, is doing there? If you don’t, key details get repeated multiple times, especially in the first couple of episodes. So Flanagan is taking on a lot here, combining his Poe greatest hits mix with elements of both Succession and Dopesick.

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Since the redeemable characters within the series are almost non-existent, watching the demise of the Ushers is nothing to be horrified about, but it is grisly nonetheless. Kim Sun Young Hair & Beauty is a full-service hair salon that offers its services in the Los Angeles area. The salon offers permanent wave styles and gives unique haircuts and hair colors to its clients. The company has been providing its services in South Korea for the past 50 years before it was established in America in 1990. Its founder, Kim Sun Young, used natural ingredients with kelp to create the first straight perm called the "panel straight."
The Last Bookstore
Sitting across from his legal adversary bathed in candlelight, sipping on million-dollar cognac, Roderick agrees to plead guilty to state charges in exchange for someone hearing his confession. Given the original Poe tale, and the fact that we hear Madeline is banging around in the basement, this isn’t going to end happily. Roderick’s dementia means his narration is frequently interrupted by sudden (and effectively spooky) hallucinations of his deceased progeny—melted by toxic waste, stabbed through the heart, or mauled by chimpanzees. Given the ultra-rich family and Big Pharma context, one assumes that Flanagan was taking notes on Succession and Dopesick. Fortunato is the manufacturer of Ligadone, a fictional painkiller that has caused an opioid epidemic, prompting a lawsuit leveled by D.A. When Dupin announces in court that the prosecution has an informant inside the Usher circle, waves of recrimination and paranoia sweep the backstabbing siblings.

Shortly after, exhausted by tragedy and terrible visions, Usher sits down with investigator C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly) to relate the stories of his offspring’s bizarre, horrible ends, and his own litany of awful crimes. Horror journalist, RT Top Critic, and Critics Choice Association member. Has appeared on PBS series' Monstrum, served on the SXSW Midnighter shorts jury, and moderated horror panels for WonderCon and SeriesFest. Framing the season is Roderick’s post-funeral dialogue with Dupin, who has been summoned by the six-time bereaved pop to the Ushers’ crumbling family home one night.
“The Haunted Palace”
Of course, the binge release hasn’t exactly hurt Flanagan in the past. And some specific episodes — like the Hill House installment presented as a single take, even as it moved through two houses in two time periods — have gotten individual and relatively long-lasting attention, rather than being swallowed up by the whole thing. I watched all of The Fall of the House of Usher over a couple of days because that’s when my work schedule allowed it, and began to feel fatigued by the structure during that tight window. And in an increasingly chaotic streaming world, it’s always reassuring to have another of his projects turn up in my queue. But the narrative mostly lacks the poetic sensibility and depth of feeling, the weight of profundity that makes Poe such a perennial favorite.
They can also recommend great stuff for first-timers, as well as gift suggestions for anyone on your list. After four series for Netflix, including The Haunting Of Hill House and Midnight Mass, Flanagan has really found his confident groove. He’s as adept as ever at creating a spooky mood, but his storytelling is defter than it’s been before. Past projects have had a bit of sentimentality about them, but Usher doesn’t allow itself huggy endings or nice guys to root for. Instead, it has the harder job of reckoning with apparently irredeemable people, asking what brought them here and how monsters are created. The Ushers may not elicit much sympathy, but they do (mostly) earn some understanding.
Creator Mike Flanagan’s latest and final series collaboration with Netflix, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” takes on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Much like “The Haunting of Bly Manor,” Flanagan’s latest uses a classic short story as the central narrative framework to remix a variety of Poe’s macabre poems and short stories but with Flanagan’s signature pathos. Unlike previous Netflix series, “The Fall of the House of Usher” eschews the familiar melancholy and dials up the gallows humor for a twisted tale that’s unafraid to get grisly. Flanagan tends to work with a core rotating ensemble of actors, similar to American Horror Story’s anthology approach to recurring casts.
That’s the type of delicious schadenfreude that The Fall of the House of Usher offers. We watch on as each victim – Usher or otherwise – makes their proverbial bed despite the grace of the literal warnings offered. After all, hubris, like any of the fine products from the Roderick-run Fortunato, is a hell of a drug. Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) attends a joint funeral for a number of his adult children, and in a montage of press coverage, we see how a series of “freak accidents” has wiped out his entire bloodline. The Usher patriarch then sits in a dilapidated mansion with Carl Lumbly’s Auguste Dupin (based on Poe’s famous recurring character who is considered the first detective in fiction) and offers him a confession. We then flash back a few weeks to when the Usher clan were on top of the world, having become Sackler-esque billionaires peddling opiates that have inflicted untold misery on the American public, and begin to watch their painful demise.
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Complete digital access plus the FT newspaper delivered Monday-Saturday. Complete digital access to quality FT journalism with expert analysis from industry leaders. We do get some fabulous creative moments, like Flanagan’s gleeful edit of an opening montage that introduces us to all members of the Usher family through witty cross-cuts and overlapping dialogue.
Once that initial confusion is out of the way, part of what makes it work is how each episode manages to tell its own self-contained story about the victim in question while also steadily advancing the overarching tale of what Roderick did to deserve this fate. The mystery, which seems so obvious early on, becomes more complicated and even darker than I first imagined. The cast is made up of Flanagan regulars who make up for a delightfully despicable group of asshole millionaires. There’s not a moment where The Fall of the House of Usher doesn’t shine, whether it’s in the gloss of Louboutins or the pools of blood.
It turns out that almost every branch of the Usher family tree has been cut by violent horror. ” “No, not before,” he replies in one of the show’s many glimpses of Flanagan’s viciously dark sense of humor. (Poe had one too.) Roderick has been haunted by all his awful children who have shuffled off this mortal coil, and it’s because it feels like the ghosts are finally coming for him that he is ready to confess. He’s having visions of monstrous ghosts, including the recurring specter of Verna (Carla Gugino), a figure that connects most of these tall tales as a sort of vengeful force of karma, the devil come to take what she’s due from a man who profited off the pain of others. Late one stormy night, Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) invites an investigator named C. He offers to lay out the truth about his family’s criminal, violent history.
The keystone of their business is a wildly popular pain-killing drug called Ligodone, which they claim is safe and non-addictive despite many, many deaths over the years resulting from abuse of the drug. While you can mostly see where things are headed in a broad sense, House of Usher excels at the details, from the thematically fitting way that characters are killed to the truth behind Roderick’s deadly deal. Even something as seemingly simple as an ignored text message becomes a powerfully tragic moment, full of both terror and heartbreak. That combination, of course, is exactly what Flanagan is known for, and it remains strong in House of Usher... By Andrew Webster, an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. A stunning use of Poe’s work as the Cliffs Notes to his own majestic, intricate brand of storytelling, Flanagan’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” showcases what the 1% is willing to sacrifice to remain in high places.