TV Review - Midnight Mass (15)

 We are living in a miraculous time.

Mike Flanagan is a name that's been creeping up on me. 'You haven't watched The Haunting of Hill House yet?' friends and family have asked me. 'Bly Manor's not as good, but it's still good.' Now Doctor Sleep I have seen - a creditable attempt to adapt Stephen King's Shining sequel, while also acting as a follow-on from Stanley Kubrick's iconic but very non-King Shining movie. And my brother insists the Flanagan-adapted Gerald's Game is another superior screen version of a King novel. So when I happened on Midnight Mass while browsing around Netflix and discovered it's the writer-director's latest, it fast became clear why he's getting so much good word-of-mouth - and why labelling him as a creator of 'horror' falls short of what he's achieving.

Unlike the hauntings of Hill House and Bly Manor (based on Shirley James' novel and inspired by Henry James' The Turn of the Screw respectively), Midnight Mass is a full Flanagan creation, though its setting off the coast of Maine suggest the story's debt of gratitude to the aforementioned Mr King. It starts with Riley Flynn - a lost soul who returns to the tiny island fishing community of Crockett's Island where he was born and raised, carrying with him a very particular burden of guilt. He finds the island effectively dying - population whittled to a hundred or so, the core industry undermined, and the islanders sapped of hope. The place needs a miracle, and seems to find a literal source of them in new priest Father Paul, who has arrived as replacement for the island's beloved Monsignor Pruitt. His mission - one that even he doesn't seem fully to understand - leads to religious revival in this once pious Catholic community. But darker events are occurring too on Crockett's Island, and Riley's skepticism regarding developments at the church (of which his family is an integral part) may prove well-founded.

So far so eery, and as it progresses, Midnight Mass more than ticks the boxes to prove its horror credentials. Yet this show so far transcends the genre as to be one of the year's most impressive TV dramas - and my own personal favourite. How? Not least because for the first several episodes it rejects cheap scares in favour of a slow-chill effect, along with immersion in the Crockett's Island community. The locations are shot with an eye to their bleak beauty and run-down aesthetic, the island taking on its own character while serving as backdrop to quietly unfolding individual dramas. Our leading protagonist, burdened in spirit and wrestling with addiction, is only one among numerous residents immersed everyday struggles. There's the talented local physician with an ailing mother, the pregnant single schoolteacher, and the town drunk with his own source of shame, to say nothing of the sheriff - a single father and devout Muslim keeping order in a Catholic community. What's his story, and what role will he play in the mystery that so painstakingly, creepily unfolds? What roles will any of them play? The answers will take their time, and be properly shattering when they do.

It's the Stephen King factor again - reveal the minutiae of your characters' communal lives, and your audience will care, deeply so, once events turn dark and life-altering. But Flanagan digs deeper than soap-opera levels of acquaintance with these individuals - he uncovers their hearts, souls, and most deeply held beliefs, spiritual or otherwise. An ex altar boy and recovering addict himself, there's a whole lot of the writer in this detailed character drama, and he does more than mine religion for exploitative horror thrills (though there's a bit of that). Midnight Mass draws out themes of guilt and redemption, hate and forgiveness, and the human struggle with grief and loss - all of which might be heavy-as-hell, if it weren't so superbly written and imaginatively explored. Oh, and if it weren't tinged with an ever-present, indefinable sense of dread. There's also a delving into the experience of religion - personal and communal - and a study of how dark influences can prey on devotion, never less than in a time of community crisis. 

Which brings me to the performances, the first among equals being that of Hamish Linklater as Father Paul. Flanagan draws on an established ensemble of actors for his TV series (many Midnight Mass cast members are alumni from his Haunting shows), so it's fitting that Linklater is a fresh face as the priest sweeping up the congregants in a new kind of fervour. His initially odd and stumbling portrayal grows in power, while never losing its complexity, as the drama develops. He compels and disconcerts at the same time, keeping the character's motives intriguingly elusive. His extended dialogues with Zach Gilford's atheist Riley make for some of the show's most fascinating scenes, and when he cuts loose in the pulpit, you feel swept along rather than alienated by his words. There's a near-irresistible appeal to his message, backed up as it is with weird charisma along with the story's moments of seeming grace. The same cannot be said for Bev Keane (played with narrow-eyed relish by director's favourite Samantha Sloyan), a Scripture-wielding zealot, whose self-righteous piety turns her into a more unambiguously chilling antagonist. With the new Father's arrival she truly feels her time has come, and Sloyan's portrayal is resultantly flesh-crawling. Heaven preserve us from the Bevs of this world.  

If she's a reminder of the worst in small-town and religious life, there are characters - believer and doubter alike - who serve as a corrective, starting with Riley's family and his lost love, the child-bearing Erin (a strikingly beautiful and moving performance from Kate Siegel). It's this, of course, that makes the story's slow but exponential plunge into darkness so unnerving, rather than sinister incidental music (the soundtrack deals instead in haunting folk versions of traditional hymns) and jump scares. You're concerned for characters in whom you've become invested, and with good reason. Thing is, their individual journeys don't get sidelined when events go critical - this may go from a character study into something more recognisable in scary-story terms, but ultimately it's all about the Crockett Island residents' trial by fear. That's what makes Midnight Mass so engrossing - it puts the horror into drama, and the drama most commendably into horror. 

Okay. Now time for me to check out everything else Mike Flanagan has done. I'm looking forward to this...

Ed's Verdict: 10/10. Much more interested in building its world and fleshing out its themes than throwing out cheap thrills, Midnight Mass is horror for grown-ups, which delivers on its set-up in ways that both shock and satisfy.