The Fall of Usher

I watched about 20 minutes of it, slow, dull, the way the guy narrates it simply doesn't work. I dislike not finishing a movie, but I just felt that I couldn't be bothered to continue on with it.

I remember watching Romeo & Juliette several years ago with Leonardo DiCaprio and liking it a lot. Sure, it's not easy to process old Shakespearean English in our day & age - and it's similar here, with "The Fall of Usher." I especially liked the part where Romeos' father says, "Bring me my broadsword," while grabbing a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun.

But, if you can get past that aspect of the film, I rather like the way Edgar Allen Poe wrote, way back when. And after that, I found the rest of this movie enjoyable enough. It's generally pretty slow in the narration and story-telling, and not necessarily really "scary" or containing a lot of cheap "jump scares."

Here, the horror lies in the descent of a mans' consciousness into madness and the process by which he finds himself undone. It's a slow, psychological kind of horror. I found the movie enjoyable enough.

The Fall of Usher (2021) is a movie that I recently watched on Prime. The storyline follows a young man taking care of his father with no other real purpose. He begins seeing strange things around his house and can't tell if they're real or his imagination; or simply, they are his demise and he's just here to tell you how and why...

This movie is written and directed by Brian Cunningham (Overtime) and stars Spencer Korcz (Wretch), Michael R Mcguire, James Tackett (United We Fall), Savannah Schafer (Beasts of the Field) and Riker Hill (Tears in the Snow).

Everything about the main character is annoying - his look, voice, narrations, mannerisms, your okay with pretty much anything that happens to him in the movie. The storyline is nothing special and the cinematography for a modern film was disappointing, even if there were a couple good scenes with how they used lighting. The background sound effects and corpses were good, but the horror elements were lacking and nothing special.

Overall, this was nothing special and not worth your time. I would score this a 2.5/10 and recommend skipping it.

I'll agree with others that the start of the story was slow, but one you make it through the first 20 minutes, you find yourself wondering how all the bits are going to tie together and what's going to happen next. It's anybodies guess and the macabre of Poe, is really evident. The music show is fantastic and the acting and direction was well done when considering this is isn't a multi million dollar blockbuster budget. It was low budget and should be compared as such. It reminds me of when movies were made for the passion of art of the story, not as an investment opportunity. Definitely worth a watch.

This may not be a movie for everyone, as the previous and only other review clearly indicates. But, it truly is a work for fans of Poe's writing.

It is dark. It is unrelenting. And the atmosphere descends through black depths as the truths of the horror unfold.

Poe's writing is not scary in the modern horror-movie-fan sense, rather, it is dark, ominous, and unrelenting as the reader peels back layer after layer of the narrator's insanity to uncover the actual horror story.

The Fall of Usher is not a retelling or modernization of any specific works of Poe, but a re-weaving of many of the themes and atmospheres from multiple stories.

The movie opens with a classic Poe device of the main character talking directly to the audience (or perhaps just himself), and although that specific device does not return, the use of archaic Poe language, dialogue, narration and silent movie-esque cards, keeps the viewer grounded in Poe's era even while the setting remains modern day.

This is the definition of slow-burn done right--not boring, not plotted poorly, but rather the viewer is taken on a ride of reveal after reveal, a step-by-step uncovering the actual reality that is being hidden deep in the mind of the unreliable and insane narrator. Even the tiny cast and small set evoke the claustrophobia which lies at the core of several of Poe's stories.

Most "fans" of Poe, are not really fans of his actual writing--most find it overly complex and opaque, even if they love the soul of the horror story as told. The Fall of Usher definitely follows not only the "soul" of Poe's works, but the actual complex, opaque devices and dialogue, and because of that, it's true that its audience may be niche.

If you truly love to *read* the works of Poe, if you swoon over the complex language he uses to evoke his dark atmospheres, if you live for half-page-long sentences, stuffed with iterative atmospheric descriptions, then you will find SO much to love in this movie!