As a story told through mystery and ambiguity, there's a lot The Fall of the House of Usher (2023) leaves to interpretation.
- Were the people who died horribly at Prospero's orgy asshole victims or Aesop Collateral Damage? The fact that Verna made a point of using her powers to evacuate all the wait staff and attempted to do the same with at least one of the guests (Morella) implies that she actively chose who to spare and who to let die in a horrific fashion, so the whole incident was far more targeted than a casual viewing might imply. Following the themes of the story, all non-charitable rich people are evil and deserve horrific deaths. This is stated almost verbatim by Verna in the finale, where she considers that even inaction by capital to solve the world's problems is practically a deadly sin (any dollar not spent on saving the world will cause people to die). She evacuated (or tried to evacuate) everyone at the party who didn't have a negative ledger to their actions: the working-class wait staff, and Morrie, whom we later learn causes net good in the world through her actions.
- Did Toby and Beth actually fall in love, or were they lying and hoped that Camille would buy it and they wouldn't have to sleep with her any more? As Camille points out, it is quite convenient that they only declared their love once all of Beth's student loans had been paid off.
- Was Camille being arrogant and Bullying a Dragon when she was facing a Verna-possessed chimpanzee or was she facing death with dignity? The latter could be inferred from her final moments, when she decides to take a picture of the chimp anyway, regardless of the consequences. Or even a case of Taking You with Me—if she's going to die anyway, she's at least going to get the evidence needed to take down Victorine first. Or perhaps she was still tricked by Verna's illusion, seeing the chimpanzees only when it finally lunged at her?
- Were Victorine's, Napoleon's, and Tamerlane's hallucinations caused by Verna, extreme stress and exhaustion, or early-onset CADASIL inherited from their father? Regarding Leo, did the amount of drugs in his system and the deaths of his younger siblings contribute?
- Camille is responsible for the entire Usher corporation's public image, including everything from giant businesses in trouble with the EPA to five loose-cannon siblings just ready to start a new controversy. She even maintains a secret charity wing on the side so that any member of the family can take credit for some charitable contribution in case they need a quick hit of media good will. Was she justified in being angry that Victorine might be hiding something in her lab that could turn into a massive scandal, which Camille would be responsible for cleaning up if it got out? Or was her obsession with Victorine's project a case of Sibling Rivalry taken to fatal extremes?
- While the series stylistically jumps around to different perspectives, this masks the fact that the entire story is simply a narrative being told by Roderick to Dupin; at its most basic level, it consists only of how Roderick claims the downfall of his family unfolded. All of the evidence for Verna—the pictures, the video, the direct interactions with other characters outside of Roderick—we are merely told existed through Roderick. Though it is entirely possible the Ushers managed to hide it through their evidence tampering, the authorities never show awareness of there being a person in common at all of these deaths, meaning the only indirect circumstantial evidence to back Roderick's claims of a third party pulling strings, acknowledged independently from Roderick's story, is the one Dupin points out in relation to the first tragedy, that is, the fact that all the wait staff at the orgy left the premises at the same time right before the sprinklers were activated, and don't recall being told to do so by any specific person. So, is Verna a real supernatural entity the Ushers made a deal with in 1980 for success and freedom from legal consequences, or a fiction created by Roderick's unstable mind to explain a horrible series of coincidental deaths and to represent via curse the actually entirely mundane destructive pall his and his sister's choices cast over his family?
- Did Auguste Dupin really, objectively see Verna perched on the ruins of Usher House? Or was he unnerved by the story and subsequent events he just fled from to the point where Roderick's story played tricks with his own mind for a second?
- Did Victorine block out the memory of Al's death and believe that the fight ended with Al storming out without her throwing the marble bookend? Or did she convince herself that because she implanted the heart mesh prototype, Al had survived her injury?
- Would Camille have died in the chimpanzee accident anyway, without Verna's involvement?
- Did Victorine really deliberately stab herself? Or did Verna possess her and do it for her (seemingly explaining her surprisingly calm and collected final monologue, and look of surprise to find herself stabbed afterward)? If so, was her confused, panicked "Daddy?" because she thought Roderick had been the one to stab her? Alternatively, did Roderick hallucinate Victorine's final monologue, and Victorine killed herself without saying what Roderick believes she did? Victorine's monologue references and supports Roderick's earlier contemplation of suicide to spare his family, which Victorine couldn't have known about, but in later episodes we see very clearly that Verna refuses to let Roderick get out of the terms of the deal via suicide, so Victorine isn't expressing anything Verna would agree with. At the moment of Victorine's death, the only person who knew about Roderick's suicidal line of thought and agreed with it was Roderick himself. Or, is it Verna twisting the knife in Roderick, since Victorine's monologue concludes that she would have "ha[d] to do this" even if Roderick had jumped, because "success is everything"?
- Did Victorine genuinely love Al, or was she just with her to gain access to the heart mesh as Camille suspected?
