Have you thought about your resolution for 2024, yet? Do you think you’ll cut back on the carbs, make an effort to work out, do yoga, meditate, and drink more water? Maybe your resolution is bigger than health or fitness. Perhaps you’ve made a promise to yourself to travel more or take time off and finally finish writing that book you’ve been tabling for years. Whatever your resolution is, can you actually guarantee that you’ll follow through with it? Can you uphold the decision—a promise—that things will change, permanently? Perhaps some of us can, but for twins Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) and Madeline Usher (Mary McDonnell), something much stronger ensures that their joint decision would be upheld throughout the entirety of their lifetimes.

*The Fall Of The House Of Usher,* *Image via IMDB*

Spoilers ahead!

Call it karmic retribution, or karma, call it fate, destiny even—everything is said to have its consequence. In the case of Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of The House of Usher, Consequence inevitably returns to collect on a deal made with the Ushers. Although it has been decades since that New Years Eve night, when young Roderick (Zach Gilford) and Madeline (Willa Fitzgerald) were convinced only hours later, that the deal they had just struck, and its stakes, were just some folie à deux—and had long been forgotten.

Until now.

Before we are able to know what really happened all those years ago, Roderick first needs to confess how he and Madeline got to this point before the family’s name and legacy would fall forever. Having been on trial for some weeks now with no conviction in sight, Roderick requests that Detective C. Auguste “Auggie” Dupin meet him for a private interview—a confession. Although viewers are unaware at the time, Roderick and Dupin’s relationship goes back much further than the recent trials, preventing any chance to miss this opportunity to convict the patriarch of the drug dynasty, Fortunato Pharmaceuticals. Seemingly created with the real-life Sacklers in mind, Flanagan draws from several of Edgar Allan Poe’s macabre prose to create his own deranged, opioid-pushing family of billionaires.

The interview takes place in Roderick and Madeline’s childhood home. An ode to Poe, the now-decaying structure with all its musk, darkness, and gothic characteristics is not just a meeting place, but a metaphor for the biological fate of the Usher family. With only the living room still seemingly inhabitable, or at least suitable for the meeting, the two men sit by the firelight in worn leather chairs with glasses of cognac as Roderick starts to recall the deaths of all his children. In the span of a week, each Usher spawn had been plucked from the Earth, and in many cases, the way in which they died manages to reference a Poe-written tale or poem, or at the very least, the child themselves is named after one of his characters.

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As a viewer, we’ve already been told that each child is dead, having witnessed the funeral of the final, and eldest three—just not how. Thoughtfully stringing us along, Flanagan makes it a point to give us even more insight into these deaths, revealing their ghost in the dark corners of camera shots, much like in The Haunting of Bly Manor or Hill House. In scarier cases, the ghosts come face to face with Roderick, causing him to struggle when relaying these already investigated instances back to Auggie. But, just as Ande recently referenced in his analysis of Flanagan’s Absentia, the ghosts, while sometimes providing scares or horror, are not there for us as the viewer, but serve as an anchor for, in this case, their father’s pain—even if it is his fault they’re dead. This purpose is further solidified by the fact that Auggie cannot see these ghosts, even when they appear to be right in front of him. Instead, he adamantly presses for Roderick’s confession, hanging on to the hope that he’ll find something to use to convict the Ushers and achieve some long-sought justice for the millions of deaths they’d caused with their addictive painkillers.

A quick explanation is not that simple, though. There is no doubt that when you watch a series by Flanagan, you are in it for the long haul. As a director, he makes it easy for us, though. While we are always anticipating some clue behind each tragic death to shine a light on what Roderick and Madeline did, we continue to uncover details worth debating whether or not peace will be achieved for the victims of Fortunado when the Ushers face retribution for their part in essentially genocide—or if eternal punishment would also fall short.

So, does everyone truly get what they deserve—what they have coming to them? As the viewer, we can form our own opinions as to whether the brutal deaths in one family is worth the destruction of millions of others or not. Deadly opioids aside, it’s not quite a matter of killing billionaires or the “eat the rich” messages swirling in real life and other series like YOU or The Menu, either. Again, we’re already aware of what’s happening, so to be able to make us still care why it is happening is an art in itself. Thanks to our characters’ powerful performances, their traumas, and how much money has actually changed—damaged—them, we can sit and savor the inescapable demise of every Usher character, all the while relishing the vicarious gratification intertwined with Flanagan's signature scares, encompassing both the tangible and the otherworldly.

Of course, Flanagan tells us throughout the series what he thinks, too, and perhaps, what Poe might have thought as well, should he have lived in such a modern Gothic period. While neither seem to be men of God, and judging by the poems and stories referenced throughout Flanagan’s modernization of the tales, the personification of consequence in the form of a raven couldn’t be more fitting. In a world retold where the divide between those who see themselves as divine and those who believe that recognizing the divine is humanity's only salvation, this story needed the raven. Neither God nor the gavel could provide proper karmic retribution—this story needed Verna (Carla Gugino), a woman who would go by an anagram for the bird. Clever and ruthless, Verna takes many forms and challenges each character in such personal ways that you’d swear she had a personal vendetta against them. And I suppose in some ways, she did.

It's a melancholic and exasperating division, truly extending beyond religious connotations. Whether you’re a fan of Poe or Flanagan, of neither, or both, I encourage you to watch this extended parable and open your eyes to the messages expressed in this unique and craftfully put-together modern gothic tale.