Film Journal 2023: The Fall of the House of Usher
Directed by Mike Flanagan
Flanqan’s stark and rapid fall from favor in my eyes might be the far more interesting story than this take on an Edgar Allen Poe adaptation. My love for Dr. Sleep met with my general disinterest in the rather tepid and benign haunting of hillhouse and my outright disdain for Midnight Mass, a show I found to be in bad faith and more than a bit deceptive.
The Fall of the House of Usher leans more towards the generally benign in terms of motivation, but also reaches for bland and uninspired. At the very least hill house had some visual intrigue. In Usher, not only is the storyline broadcast from the beginning, a massive cast keeps it steadily bound to its pefucantory and drawn out dialogue. For a cast this big, there are very few to no interesting characters to actually fill out the space and carry the load of that static story. Just to reiterate, this is about the house of Usher and its inevitable fall. And once we know who the house of Usher is, something that is made clear from episode one, every possible allegory and metaphor, which for Flanigan unsurprisingly comes from the relgious imagery, becomes obvious and clear.
It also doesn’t help that this is 8 episodes. Maybe this would have worked as a three parter? Even then, the blandness of the story would likely hamper this. But the experience of being dragged through 5 episodes of drawn out filler might have felt like less of an affront.
I hate to say it, but I’m almost out on this guy. Which saddens me, because I thought Doctor Sleep was flat out inspired.
The Stories of my Life 