Scripture is often quoted throughout Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass, mostly by Father Paul (Hamish Linklater) in his homilies, and mostly in ways that never feel as if they’re being weaponized against his congregants. The sense that this man, even as he’s clearly being consumed by some kind of evil, is earnestly trying to get the people of Crockett Island to engage with each other in more meaningful ways is the saving grace of Midnight Mass.
The series, as is customary of Flanagan’s work, exudes a narcotic pull in everything from its aesthetics to monologues that suggest the weight of confession. But you can never quite shake the sense that Midnight Mass is biding its time until it’s ready to deliver unto us the next dollop of meaning. For as impeccably as it conveys the comfort that a community living on an island off the coast of Oregon takes in sermon, the series spends an inordinate amount of time riffing on the theme that no man is an island. Flanagan’s greatest trick may be convincing us for more than seven hours that what he has to say about faith is as nuanced as it is redundant.
Midnight Mass begins with one of the few scenes in the series that doesn’t take place on Crockett Island: a depiction of the aftermath of a drunk-driving accident that sentenced Riley (Zach Gilford) to prison for four years. Haunted by the specter of the woman he killed, the missing pieces of her face lit up by blinking neon lights, Riley returns home a broken man. Having lost his faith, he seems perfectly primed to regain it. And if not that, then for a battle of wills to play out between him and Father Paul during their late-night counseling sessions.
Midnight Mass is conspicuously veiled in the trappings of a Stephen King novel, to the point that it suggests an attempt at beating the master at his own game. For one, it invites inevitable comparison to King’s Under the Dome, in which the denizens of a small Maine town must survive after being closed off from the rest of the world. The people of Crockett Island may be able to travel to the mainland, but most would seem to prefer that that they don’t have that choice. On this island, the walls of a church are a people’s self-imposed dome.
It’s hard to argue that Flanagan’s ear for dialogue isn’t as tinny as King’s, but Midnight Mass wants for the pungency of Under the Dome, or even that of the eerily similar American Horror Story: Double Feature, throughout which Ryan Murphy appears to be confessing to all the costs of his zeal for artistic creation. Horror isn’t the guiding principle of Midnight Mass, which is a weird thing to say given the extent to which blood figures into the proceedings, but it doesn’t even possess the emotional nuance of Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House.
The inevitable result of spending too much time within the walls of a church is that we rarely get a sense of why the 127 people who live on Crockett Island arrived there in the first place. The story that Sheriff Hassan (Rahul Kohli) shares about his experiences as a Muslim officer of the law after 9/11 is a notable exception, but the poignancy of this moment is undermined by how it becomes a device for suspense—namely, whether or not the sheriff will bring his gun into church. Elsewhere, the closest thing that we get to people truly grappling with feelings of guilt and anger and how that’s tied to blind faith, and faith in people, is the confrontation between young Leeza (Annarah Cymone) and the man (Matt Biedel) who paralyzed her.
In terms of suspense, it’s certainly intoxicating to watch Father Paul give his homilies and to ponder their ultimate purpose, to what extent someone may or may not be pulling his strings, and if there’s more than just wine in the communion chalice. But after a while it comes to feel as if Midnight Mass is content to play footsies with us until its final act of revelation.
Midnight Mass has its fair share of movingly performed monologues, namely one conversation between Riley and his childhood crush, Annie (Kate Siegel), that sadly, quietly reorients our expectations of his destiny. And yet, like everything in the series, where the most dramatic thing that occurs outside of the metaphorically charged bloodletting is whether or not the town’s one truly toxic human force poisoned a dog to death, even these monologues are all rise and no crescendo. That is, no doubt, by design, and Flanagan has an uncanny way of making us believe that even his goofiest turn of the screw is serving a greater purpose. Which makes it all the disappointing that its final line of dialogue is essentially a confirmation of the easy summation that many might think that Flanagan is too empathetic to actually deliver: that faith is, if not a delusion, a distraction from what makes us truly human.
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