Midnight Mass: The Sun Rises on the Good and Bad Alike

 

Writing a review of the Netflix horror miniseries "Midnight Mass" that does what I want it to do is hard.

On one hand: I want you to watch it. If your bar for entertainment is watching series on streaming services, and you care enough about mythic themes and/or class analysis to be reading this, then this is a series you will derive enjoyment from. The acting is fine, the dialogue is fine, the plot is fine, the cinematography is fine. All more than fine, really. A solid B+ or even A-. If you can spend your time watching She-Ra or Westworld or Shang-Chi, than you damn well will find this show as entertaining as any of those.

Of course, as a horror mini-series, much of it turns on a couple plot revelations we could call spoilers. I'm not gonna sink to the level of trying to really dig into this work while avoiding the basic plot structure and themes, so reading this review will spoil you if you haven't seen it. And I just encouraged you to see it. So that's an unfortunate Catch-22 that cuts out most of my audience. (This reminds me of a famous review of Litany of Earth, a genre story.)

But the biggest problem is that all the interesting things I have to say are about how this story fails. As a way to pass the time, I recommend this series. As high art worthy of appreciation, I don't think it measures up. But why it doesn't measure up is in fact really important and illuminating. So it's also worth watching just to understand that, or contest my interpretations. Even though after reading a bunch of criticisms, people usually don't want to invest seven hours in something to see it for themselves.

(Don't worry I'll also casually point out a bunch of themes and moments that are perfectly obvious, but every single hot take and review out there will either miss, or cover like a holy revelation. Did you notice that each episode title is a part of the Bible that corresponds roughly to the place of this episode in the plot arc? I sure hope so.)

And as always, I have some meta-narratives about the nature of art I want to get at in this review, that it will be sad not to share just because of that dreaded word. So I've made it possible to jump over like, the actual substance of the review to the conclusion.

I don't even think knowing the spoilers ruin the enjoyment of the story, so read on if you can throw caution to the wind. But yeah, spoilers from these three asterisks to the next three.

***

The first thing is to say how much the author (writer/director/producer) Mike Flanigan loves the idea behind this story. You can read from this heart-opening essay by him how long he had been trying to get the idea translated into any form.

Midnight Mass has been part of me for so long, it’s difficult to remember when exactly it started. There has probably never been a project more personal to me. Its journey to the screen was very long, I’ve changed enormously since I began working on it (as has the world in general) and as of this writing, it’s the single most rewarding professional experience of my life. 

I don’t remember the first time I started thinking about the doomed residents of Crockett Island, but I recently dug up the pages from my first stab at a Midnight Mass novel from early 2010. I have also found pages from an attempt at a feature script dated May 2012, before I quit my job as a reality TV show editor and began prepping Oculus – my first “real” movie – later that summer. 

I have a more advanced screenplay from 2013, and I remember the moment when I realized it wasn’t going to work: I was well over 150 pages into the draft, Riley Flynn and Father Paul Hill were having their first consequential conversation about alcohol

...

It’s fascinating to me, looking back at early drafts of Midnight Mass, just how plainly my own issues with alcohol were driving the story. Riley Flynn, former altar boy turned atheist, stares through bloodshot eyes at the car accident he caused, watching an innocent teenager die on the pavement because he drove drunk. And this is how we meet the protagonist. Riley was always a thinly disguised surrogate, an avatar unlikely to fool anyone except myself, who wouldn’t admit how much I had in common with my own character for many years. 

Nothing wrong with putting his own personal demons into one of the main characters. And really this essay is using vagueness and focus on biography to avoid what he is really talking about because of that dread word Spoilers.

To put it bluntly and simply: Midnight Mass is story about a priest bitten by a vampire who sees the monster instead as an Angel of the Lord and brings it back to his declining parish who turn it into a Catholic mystical cult. This works in how much of Christianity makes references to resurrection, everlasting life, drinking someone's "blood", obedience to authority, holy war and cataclysm, and ornate ritualism. It also works in how declining fishing and post-industrial communities are places of pain and hopelessness and can be suckered into new addictions easily. It also allows you to address ideas of forgiveness, what we believe lies after death, and the sociology of religions. It allows you to build a couple of characters very richly, full of angst about past decisions, as well as populate a whole town from pattern-cut stereotypes (the busybody nun, the town drunk) and and more modern characters who are millennial cultural commentary (the Muslim sheriff dealing with racism and suspicion, the daughter of the abusive alcoholic everyone ignored.) It invites a ton of moving-but-stock imagery, from desolate northern coastlines to Catholic liturgies covered in blood. And you know the end is going to be an orgy of violence, perfect for sweeps week.

There is in short, a lot of meat on the bones of this idea.

Anyone who has kept a private passion project that they worked on for years, watching as it seemingly built itself out in your head, knows what this is like. There were just so many good ideas that could hang on the structure of this central idea, that you want it born out in a larger and larger format. A novel, no a movie, no a TV-miniseries, no a whole franchise with spinoffs and an tourist destination. So having seen the series, you know exactly what Mike had rambling around in his head for over ten years, wanting to show the world.

But that is the root of the problem. Because you look at it, and other than the desire for "largeness", you ask "why couldn't this be a novel? Or a 2 hour movie? Or a comic book?" You'd have to add or remove characters to fit the particular length, but otherwise there's nothing about the story that tells differently on the big screen than on the page. Because it's not really "Midnight Mass the tv series" it's "the idea of Midnight Mass, as interpreted through the media of streaming series."

A golden example is the monologues. Frequently in a heated scene, one character will begin giving a speech without interruption for 3-5 minutes. There's one each for defending Christianity, Islam, atheism, and holistic spirituality, but also ones for public secularism, potential visions of life after death, living with enormous guilt, living with hate for someone who hurt you, or even just apocalyptic understandings of what Christianity calls us to do. They are well written speeches - but that's it. They are entirely unrealistic in the scene in particular, because the person they are arguing with just sits back and takes it and never interrupts or asks a difficult question. And even if you forgive that for poetic license, the delivery by the actor really is not much better than if you just read it. (To be fair, the actors often go for "understated wrestling with emotional pain" which is better than hamming it up, but still not a lot is shown.) I don't hate these speeches, but they stick out like a sore thumb and feel like a tumblr blog post written at 3am. I totally read tumblr at 3am. But because I read so much of it, I don't need to watch a show with a 7 figure budget to read speeches like that.

Another example is the monster. Fun fact: the word vampire is never used in the series. Even the captions refer to it as "angel". It's a bony, inhuman creature whose only evidence of sentience is participating in certain rituals in an orderly manner and occasionally wearing clothes. Otherwise it's nothing more than a flying vermin that acts on instinct. The real transubstantiation of it is how humans interpret it as the holy messenger they want, dress it up in other words, and project into it the mission they hope it has. This story doesn't actually give any credence to Catholic mythology - there's no reason to actually believe this is the sort of angel prophets had spoken of - and that's a cool thematic decision to explain how religion is a purely human interpretation on events.

But also the monster looks kind of dumb. Well, cheap. Definitely not terrifying. When it's a couple eyes in the darkness, sure that's scary. And wearing vestments, yeah that's cool. But it's wings look too much like TV-scale CGI, and all the violence it wreaks is filmed just like any Stephen King TV monster. There's nothing that says "yes, I sure am glad you showed me this with your cinematic talents, rather than drawing a comic panel or simply writing about it."

This is especially important in horror, where your one advantage is that you are allowed, even encouraged to evoke discomfort and strong emotions in your audience. (Which, they do very early on with the dead victim of Riley Flynn appearing to him before he goes to sleep.) That's the difference between film - conveying an emotion through manipulation of the visuals and sound and speed - and television - we pointed a camera where the plot and dialogue were going on and hopefully it's not distracting in any way. 

The second to last episode captures the feeling of being trapped in a small church as some people die, resurrect as vampires, and begin feeding on the people trapped in there. Right on. The last episode, as the new vampires spread out to the island, completely fails to capture this. We see shadows in the distance, and logically we know it's bad, but we're not being put in the eyes of someone running from their own child who is suddenly crazed for blood and clawing at them. It's the Jurassic World pterodactyl scene, not the magic of found footage.

The one exception to this is a plot hole / literary device. Some people start lighting buildings on fire with the hilarious logic that:

• Every vampire will burn in the sunlight come morning.
• They control the church (and rec center which is thematically very distinct)
• If they burn every other building on the island, they can select who they want to hide during the day in the church, and everyone they don't like will die.

Okay yes, this is a very dumb plan. Destroying every single structure on a large island capable of providing shade is pretty much impossible. Especially if you consider that people can quickly build new structures if all they really need is a roof. When someone replies "well hide in the boats" they're told that a group of 4 people managed to destroy every boat on the island in the middle of the dark night. Hell one shot shows people standing on a bridge as they wait for the sunrise to come kill them as we see under the bridge is enough shade to hide them.

But we can accept it as a thematic statement. This person would rather burn the whole rest of their world if it means they get to control the one means of survival. And then when just one person is willing to burn that refuge too, they've written their own death warrant and caused the death of everyone in their project.

But the visuals go beyond even this. On a very large island a few houses are burning. And instead we see orange burning horizon everywhere. Loud explosions going off every 15 seconds for about half an hour of screentime. It's like being in the middle of an epic warzone. All from, at most, twenty-ish people tossing alcohol-soaked rags into several houses.

But at least this fits the Revelations imagery. It feels like being at the end of the world, where all is flame and ash. It's not a tactical-realistic depiction of house fires, but it conveys the fear of apocalypse. I salute that, they just didn't do it with any of their other epic violence imagery at their climax.

Which is all a pity, because again, the author chose some really interesting linkages and I can see why he wanted them to get coverage.

Multiple characters wrestle with the legacy of alcohol addiction, but because they are used to the struggle when they are faced with the power and hunger of blood-thirst, they have the will to fight it that other characters who looked down on them lack.

Someone gives a speech about how we never really die so long as the world we are a part of lives on... as we see the island that was their entire world completely annhilated down to every building and remaining soul, by their hand.

The priest's character is excellent. The nun's character - busybody moralist who seeks to be a wild eyed servant of the apocalypse - is my favorite. And their alliance and eventual conflict shows what happens when beautiful ideals crash up against those who would execute them.

The show is very, very clear that if you believe in universal love at all, it has to encompass the convicts and the drunks and the racial minorities and the people who ignored you. (Though bony vampires and fetuses are left up as more ambiguous. Whoo boy their fetus theology is... complex.)

The various small characters who aren't center stage - the Muslim kid whose assimilation to local Christianity breaks his father's heart, the elderly woman aged back to her youthfulness in what she understands was a monstrous sin, the town mayor, the weed dealer - are great ideas but even in a seven hour series don't get enough time to breathe and so feel like half-silent pieces of scenery for the more central characters to act at. Flanagan has an actual town in his head and only had this miniseries as a portal to show us parts of it. (Even originally the town was supposed to be larger, but COVID filming demanded they have no extras, so he left it extra desolate. Which is atmospheric but also begs "how do you even have a high school class?")

*** END SPOILERS

So, why do it? If you've got a perfectly good novel, or comic series, why the need to make an expensive and extremely draining filmed series. Sure we can say "the money" as an explanation for Mike, though he clearly takes pride in the story having such a platform. So where does this pride come from?

And really we are asking: why do we care? If we have a story we already love - in book form, or a videogame, or podcasts or comics - why are so many of us WILD to see it on "the big screen." Do we have ideas for how this specific visual medium will convey what's important to us about the tale?

Why do we care about yet a third big-budget Dune adaptation? Why are so many people worked up about who is voicing Mario in some animated movie coming out? Why do we sit around saying what famous actors should play niche characters from our favorite fantasy book (myself included)?

Especially when well over half the time, the adaptation is disappointing. And even a significant percentage of adaptations that are good, are so because they reject important elements of the original work: Starship Troopers, anything involving Philip K. Dick, and arguably Lord of the Rings.

Wanting something to be a movie (or streaming series) is not a process that reliably gives us something good. So, why do we do it?

My theory is that we want to be real. We want ourselves to be real in a way that everyone in the world knows who we are, and we are a constant point of reference for others. And failing that, we want the things connected to us to be real. "You work for Mr. Soandso? I met him at a party, we really hit it off." "Yeah I contribute to that group blog, yeah I played in that LARP too!" and so we want that realness for the things we really care about. We want everyone to know about our favorite characters. And if they have a visual identity and actor they are linked to, that makes them even more real. (Even if that usually means their realization won't be what we loved about them.)

It's the same reason that even after an anarchist mob throws out the monarch in the name of THE PEOPLE, everyone tries to gather close to touch the hem of the demagogue who will become their face. So they can tell their friends "yes, I was there, I touched his boot, it smelled of soup."

Part of this is just numbers. Your fanfic doesn't get any advertising. Books barely get any. But movies do get some, and so more people will "know" of the work and consider seeing it, than novels few ever hear of. (By this logic, big budget movies are "more real" than streaming series, which does seem to be the attitude people have, even though series always bring more content from the original story.)

Mike Flanagan had an idea. By getting it on Netflix it had more reality than if he just wrote it in a book or got Vertigo comics to draw it.

But that doesn't really make it better than if he had done those things.