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The people of Crockett Island, about an hour from the mainland, 127 residents, are the kind of people you’ll recognize if you’ve spent time in quaint little American villages. There are still a handful of fishermen who remember when times weren’t so lean and the place was perfect for raising a family. There are a few restless teenagers around, biding their time until they can leave. There’s the town doctor, who looks after his sick geriatric mother, and the town drunkard who, due to a tragedy that happened years ago, has an unfortunate connection to the mayor. There’s the town handyman, who runs everything from boat engines to the island’s power grid. Crockett also just had a new sheriff, a widower with a son who works in the back of the general store. Because the new lawyer is from the city – and is a Muslim – he has had a harder time integrating with his predominantly Christian neighbors.
There are also a few black sheep that have recently returned to the fold. Once upon a time Riley Flynn (Friday night lights‘Zach Gilford) went to Chicago to find his fortune. He made a bunch of money, killed a young girl while driving drunk and was sentenced to four years in prison for manslaughter. Now he’s returned to live with his younger brother, his caring mother (Kristin Lehman) and his cold, stoic blue collar father (Henry Thomas) as he picks up the pieces of his life. Also back: Erin Greene (Kate Siegel), who ran away during her younger and wilder years. She is now pregnant and has taken her late mother’s place as a city teacher. Erin and Riley have long been adorable to each other. The fact that they both meet on “The Crock Pot” once again seems like a fluke.
And then there is Father Pruitt, the Monsignor who celebrated mass in church for longer than we remember. He is so loved that everyone got together to send the octogenarian on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He was supposed to get back on the afternoon ferry that day, in fact, just before a storm shut everything down on the island. Only no one saw it, much to the dismay of critical thug Bev Keane (Samantha Sloyan), who helps out at the parsonage. Instead, a younger priest arrived. His name is Father Paul (Hamish Linklater). This sympathetic and charismatic man of god informs the congregation that Pruitt fell ill abroad; the diocese has asked Paul to replace him for the time being.
The locals don’t like strangers very much, although they treat Father Paul quite nicely. Then the miracles start to happen. The paralyzed person can suddenly walk. The sick are starting to recover. Older people seem to age upside down. Soon the church reestablished itself as the spiritual center of this once desolate village. It is as if an angel of the Lord has visited them. An angel, or maybe a devil….
You may find yourself asking a number of questions during the first few hours of writer-director Mike Flanagan’s Netflix miniseries. Midnight Mass, such as: Where is Father Pruitt really? What’s wrong with the trunk that Father Paul keeps lugging around? Who is responsible for all those stray cats dead on the shore, and who owns those glowing yellow eyes – the ones we catch staring out of the darkness at strange times? Why, exactly, does much of the cast seem to sport what is obviously makeup and prosthetics designed to make them look decades older than they are? What is behind these miracles? And is Hamish Linklater one of the top 10 actors working today?
Don’t worry, you will get all of these questions answered. (We’ll give you the last one for free: Judging by this series, yes it is. Even if you know of the 45-year-old actor’s career on stage and in TV shows like Fargo and Legion, the three-layered work Linklater does over those seven episodes is extraordinary.) It’s the way Flanagan carefully sets everything in place in anticipation of a larger-scale nightmare that makes the payoffs so satisfying, choosing from among religious horror, European folklore, American paranoia and, most notably, the back-catalog of a well-known best-selling author. He established himself as someone who can do anything, neo-slasher films like those of 2016 Silence to traditional ghost stories (see: the respective hauntings of Netflix Hill House and Manor of Bly). And he’s still a stylish filmmaker, someone who knows how to move a camera while keeping a game of capture and release in perpetual motion; man is not afraid to set up, say, the dynamics of how the whole city will cope with a crisis via a single seven minute tracking shot dancing around carrion on a beach.
But Flanagan is arguably best known for his two adaptations of Stephen King, Gerald’s game (2017) and Doctor Sleep (2019), an ambitious Shiny sequel which is both an interesting take on how to remix the signifiers of a historical film and an uplifting narrative re: the same. And it’s clear that he studied the Horror Literary Master’s playbook before he Midnight Mass, from the secluded setting of a small town abroad offering a shady “salute” to things bumping, screaming and slurping in the night. There is one work by King in particular that casts a long, dark shadow over this, but not in a bad way. (Using the series to blend in with an old image to reveal something sinister also seems terribly familiar.) Yet it feels less like a fanboyish tribute than a starting point – as if those aspects of King- dom Come had simply given Flanagan the vocabulary to express his own ideas about guilt, redemption, faith, hope and clarity on fighting your own demons.
This is why, at best, Midnight Mass manages to make room for the scary and the sublime, the perverse and the personal and the deep. It begins to culminate in the fourth episode, in which Gilford and Siegel exchange their dueling theories over death – his being the ending is a last breath of psychedelic dream, his revolving around the dying shrouded in a last cocoon of love. pure and unfiltered. The writing here proves that Flanagan is not just there to shock or frighten you, but to move you, to trigger something deeper within you than an involuntary scream (Kudos also to the co-author of this episode, Dani Parker). That he gives these two perspectives equal weight and their own slow zoom speaks volumes. No sooner have you left this high and long conversation when you are treated, shortly afterwards, at the sight of a man greedily feeding on another man’s skull.
This streak, and the climax of the episode, sets the stage for a spinning second half. Midnight Mass in the most terrifying thing on TV right now, and why this slightly under the radar version of Netflix has slowly but surely built word of mouth over the past couple of weeks. Congratulations: Now you have your perfect Halloween binge. Flanagan has publicly stated that when this show was still just a script and a dream, it was the best thing he ever did. Support this motion: For those of us who admired his work but found it a bit lacking, this limited series looks both the culmination of what he tried to do in the genre and a massive rise in power. This gives new meaning to the sacramental statement that “whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life”. And it brings out the idea that the evil that men do is bad, but the evil that the good and the pious do in the name of righteousness is even worse. All of this, and a series of final shots that perfectly blend the bloody and the beautiful. We have been truly blessed.
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