Television Review

The Fall of the House of Usher (2023) • Netflix — a dark, boring, and unnecessary adaptation

The ageing CEO of a corrupt pharmaceutical company faces his questionable past when his children start dying in mysterious and brutal ways.

Mike Flanagan’s become a staple of Netflix’s Halloween slate over the last few years. Since inking an overall deal with the streaming giant following the success of his earlier movies — most notably Hush (2016) and Gerald’s Game (2017) — Flanagan’s masterminded a horror series almost every year, interrupted only by the release of his Stephen King adaptation Doctor Sleep (2019).

His latest offering, The Fall of the House of Usher, caps his tenure at Netflix before jumping ship to rivals Amazon. Inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe and loosely adapted from his short story of the same name, House of Usher tells the story of the eponymous family who control a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, only to perish one by one under mysterious and literary circumstances.