Midnight Mass is an impressive Netflix horror mini-series. The show is directed by Mike Flanagan, a specialist in the genre, and the showrunner for The Hauntng of Bly House and The Haunting of Hill House, previously big hits on Netflix. At it's core, Midnight Mass is just another vampire show, similar in production values to Guillermo del Toro's The Strain (produced for FX in 2014). But Flanagan's mini-series is wildly ambitious, expertly acted, and transcends its genre in all respects. The film involves a vampire (and, then, a cult of vampires) arming themselves for Armageddon on a small island, an hour or so off the "mainland" -- apparently, Crockett Island, where the action takes place, is supposed to be somewhere off the coast of New England. Elements of the film seem autobiographical -- Flanagan is a recovering alcoholic and was raised as a Catholic and plot elements relating to substance abuse and morbid religiosity are integral to the show's narrative. Vampire movies exploit our fears of contagion and infection; in Midnight Mass, the Roman Catholic Church and its rituals are the agent of infection. Rather subversively, the show portrays religion as a sort of malign contagion, spreading from person to person like a species of vampirism. Vampires make more vampires. Roman Catholics make more Catholics. Both vampires and Catholics feed on the "body and the blood." Midnight Mass makes literal the notion that Christians are cannibals, devouring their God who has been made man. (The idea is already literal in Catholic theology that insists that, by transubstantiation, the elements of bread and wine are actually changed into the real body and blood of Christ.) The sad villain in Midnight Mass, a much-beloved priest become a blood-thirsty vampire, must, of course, preach to his flock. Flanagan exploits his villain's profession to present a number of flamboyant, well-written sermons. Indeed, I can't recall a horror movie that was so congested with talk, much of it brilliant, but, nonetheless, just a tiny bit annoying and tedious. Everyone preaches at everyone else and each character is granted a couple of aria-like monologues. This is particularly evident in the fourth and fifth episodes of the show in which the action slows to a stand still while the characters belabor one another with speeches and sermons. The quality of the writing is so excellent that these monologues don't irritate when consumed in reasonable doses. My recommendation is to watch no more than one episode a night. (Episodes are between 60 and 75 minutes long and pack a lot of material into each show; individual episodes are labeled by books in the Bible, beginning with Genesis and ending in the 7th episode with Revelations.) The show is made with lots of flash and dazzle. The editing is disjunctive and frequently violates the 360 degree rule, with shots involving dialogue filmed from directly opposing viewpoints. The movie also uses "time jumps", breaking up scenes into individual shots that aren't cut into seamless whole, but rather elide action to create a stuttering,,off-balance rhythm. Sound is used in an overlapping way -- we hear the last dialogue from a previous scene under a new sequence or, sometimes, the reverse technique is used -- sound and dialogue from an upcoming sequence invades the previous images. Although Flanagan is said to eschew "jump scares," in fact, the film is unpleasantly full of these cheap, but effective, shocks. The action is completely lucid and stylishly filmed. Crockett Island is fully and coherently imagined and provides a plausible backdrop against which the narrative takes place. There are "music video" montages in which the filmmaker shows action occurring at various locations but unified by a pop song that knits the individual sequences together -- this is a staple of mini-series shows of this sort, a cliche, but effectively deployed here. The long dialogue scenes will be a matter of taste for some viewers since these parts of the show are completely static. Nonetheless, the director (who also wrote the film) is obviously confident that these scenes are sufficiently interesting to engage the viewer, even thought nothing flamboyant is happening, and, if one follows my advice, and watches only one show per sitting, these parts of Midnight Mass are compelling. Horror elements are kept unobtrusive for the first two episodes but, then, become increasingly vehement and central as the show proceeds.
Riley Flynn, a young man who has been a venture capitalist, is a drunk. In the opening scene, he has killed a young woman in a drunk driving accident. He sits benumbed at the side of the road with a fresco of skyscrapers glittering across a dark bay in front of him. EMT's are working on the dying girl. Her face is encased in a glittering halo of glass shards embedded in her flesh and the broken glass glints in the flashing lights -- it's an image of some kind of strange martyrdom. After Flynn serves four years in prison, he returns to Crockett Island, where he was raised, and lives with his parents; both of them are pious Catholics and his father is a fisherman. (The film's casting is questionable -- Riley seems to be about the same age as his father which is incongruous; another prominent character, notionally an old woman with Alzheimer's Disease seems younger than her daughter, the town's physician. The idea that the people on the island have no particular age and seem younger than they should be realistically is another element of the show that puts viewers off-balance and seems intentional). The village on the island is overwhelmingly Catholic -- if there are Protestants they are few and far between and invisible. (This is a characteristic element of Catholic ideology -- Protestants as a low-grade form of heretic are just ignored. By contrast, Muslims, for instance, are prominently featured in the film since they pose a real challenge to the Catholic faith.) The town's priest, also suffering from dementia, seems to have gone missing somewhere on the Mainland. (In fact, we learn that he went on a tour of the Holy Lands, rather implausibly wandered off in a dust storm in the desert and got himself vampirized by a monstrous figure with wings that he believes to be his "guardian angel.") Spoilers will follow here, although I'm not going to report on anything that an alert viewer won't figure out by the middle of the second episode. The charismatic young priest who has replaced Monsignor Pruitt, the old pastor, is a vampire. He systematically converts the pious townsfolk into vampires by putting blood in the Communion wine. This creates an ingenious plot device: the town's atheists and outcasts and the Muslim sheriff are immune to contagion because they don't take Communion. Since Riley Flynn is an alcoholic, the priest offers to conduct AA meetings with him (required by his probation) and, later, with the town drunk, Joe Collie. In these scenes, AA tenets are rather daringly proposed to be elements of the vampire cult -- for instance, the famous Serenity Prayer, is repurposed to be an admonition to accept your vampirism as something that "can's be changed." The notion of conversion is satirized by the Catholic priest transforming his parishioners into vampires. (However, the show is completely humorless -- there's no "satire" really: all of this is played with a somber straight face.) As the priest transforms his parish into vampires, Mass can't be conducted during daylight hours -- the sun burns up vampires. So Mass is now offered at midnight. A little infusion of vampire blood does wonders for the constitution -- a paralyzed girl walks, victims of arthritis can dance again, and a woman with Alzheimer's suddenly recovers and recognizes people that she has not been able to remember for years. At first, it seems that vampire-blood is good medicine and everyone is doing well, becoming as the film tells us "their best selves." But, then, a fetus mysteriously vanishes from a pregnant woman's womb and the priest starts killing people for their blood. All of these lurid plot points are wrapped in volumes of exorbitant talk: sermons, monologues, two long recitations about the meaning of death, Bible quotations, and, finally, an exhortation by the vampire Priest to his flock, admonishing them to be soldiers prepared to do horrible things for their faith. Although in summary, the narrative sounds ridiculous, the plot is presented in a convincing way and with complete confidence -- the wild elements of the story seem reasonably motivated and the show links its motifs together into symbolic patterns that have a powerful resonance.
I'm a bit skeptical about the film's premise -- a study of faith and loss of faith presented with the eloquence of a movie by Ingmar Bergman combined with a vampire narrative that is full of hoary conventions and obvious scare elements. But, somehow, the thing works and the fundamental equation of religious faith with vampirism is both thought-provoking and persuasive.
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