The Fall of the House of Usher Review

This was the last of Mike Flanagan's horror series for Netflix before he moved to Amazon, and it is his loosest and most entertaining. Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), whose company sells an opioid called Ligodone, tells the prosecutor C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly) how each of his six children died, and the middle episodes take a Poe title apiece for the deaths, from The Masque of the Red Death to The Pit and the Pendulum. Critics were quick to see the Sacklers in it.

Michael Fimognari shot every episode and directed half of them, giving it a cold, expensive gloss, and the cast is Flanagan's repertory company at full stretch. Carla Gugino's Verna, whose name is an anagram of raven, is a gleeful, shape-shifting judge; Greenwood, who replaced the fired Frank Langella, makes Roderick a ruin who still enjoys his cruelty; and Mark Hamill's fixer Arthur Pym steals every scene he is in.

The structure announces every death in advance, so the suspense is in how rather than whether, and with six siblings to dispatch the characters are drawn broadly. The Telegraph's Ed Power found it gory rather than frightening, and Brian Tallerico found it at times overcrowded and narratively thin at once. It is still the most fun Flanagan has had.