Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass Misses the Mark
Midnight Mass. Image courtesy of Netflix.
SPOILERS WITHIN.
Mike Flanagan is a good director, and has done good work carving out a niche for himself at Netflix where his work mixes elements of horror and humanity in ways that pull at the heartstrings. His films tend to have a raw emotionality that lingers for a while after the credits roll. Even now when I think about his version of The Haunting of Hill House I am reminded of the way it made me feel, especially the utterly fantastic Episode 5, rather than the things that happened in the plot. That’s been his great talent so far, and so like everyone else I was looking forward to the next project: Midnight Mass.
Unfortunately, Midnight Mass did not do it for me. I thought the idea - that a small, isolated community mistakes a vampire for an angel - was good. I loved the setting: a tight-knit group of working class folk on an island, living their lives and going to church. The actors are all pretty good. The music, the cinematography and the editing also all top notch with some truly magnificent visual compositions and sequences. But the show is completely let down by the writing, and it’s obvious from the first episode that Flanagan is trying to break all the conventional genre rules and make something different. But, I would argue, some of those rules exist for a reason and the reason is to prevent you from making a painfully boring film where people just lecture each other for 7 hours.
The first sign that something is amiss in Midnight Mass is that some of the main characters, when we first meet them, have been very obviously aged up using makeup. So we know, straightaway, that we will be seeing younger versions of them. To me, the execution just lacked finesse. It was like Flanagan knew what story he wanted to tell, and how he wanted to tell it, and he was not going to deviate from this path even if it meant slapping some very obvious Old People makeup on the cast. It suggests this entire piece was conceived as a high concept and then the details back-filled later.
Of course something like bad makeup can be forgiven if the rest of the thing holds up, but Midnight Mass does not. It dives headlong into an incredibly plodding, wordy exploration of religion and faith and you keep sitting there thinking, “OK he’s definitely setting us up for something spectacular here, the show can’t be entirely composed of really long monologues delivered by people who just took a bong rip after a Philosophy 101 class right?” But in fact, that is exactly what the show is composed of. The narrative, such as it is, can never find any flow or rhythm because it is constantly being interrupted by (I’m not kidding) 15-minute long conversations between lifeless sacks of flour about God and existence. It is borderline excruciating, and one only sticks with it because of the hope being dangled over your head that at some point a vampire is going to show up and kill all of these people.
Look, I get what Flanagan is trying to do here. He’s trying to expand the boundaries of the genre, and so he doesn’t just do straight ghost stories or creature features. Bly Manor was a ghost story, but it was really a love story and a story of family and friendship and it was excellent. Here he is trying to make a vampire story that is actually about life, the universe and everything in it. Which is ambitious but basically fine as a concept. Except he commits the cardinal sin of telling instead of showing. I think this was pretty clearly a deliberate and conscious choice, and one he made because his past success has probably given him carte blanche to do weirder and more out-there stuff, like fill a 7-hour limited series with about 4 hours of monologues about God. At this point, who at Netflix is gonna tell him no?
But for me it doesn’t work. It’s too slow and the dialogue is actually pretty terrible in most cases even though it clearly thinks that it is some Shakespeare level shit. When Kate Siegel (who is great in this btw) gives her deathbed monologue it is literally a word salad of “I am we, and we are thee, and us am I and the world. Everything. This. Here. Now. Eternity.” And you just know whoever wrote that was super pumped thinking the meaning of life was being channeled through them in that moment and spilling out in these magical golden syllables but actually it’s mind-blowing how sophomoric it is.
I understand some people, especially those who had a more religious upbringing, have found something in the show that resonates with them. I am happy for those people. For me, the show promised vampires but instead just gave us scenes that could work as SNL skits like when the priest tells everyone to drink poison and be resurrected as God’s chosen ones and they do and then they instantly turn into monsters and straightaway he’s like “Oh man that was a bad idea” in an Owen Wilson voice. Sometimes I wondered if Flanagan was going for like a low-key satirical comedy featuring a gaggle of probable Trump voters being hoodwinked into mistaking a vampire for an angel, but I don’t think so. There is a definite earnestness and a self-seriousness in the film, and in the dialogue, and that’s part of what makes it so boring.
Having said all that, I do support filmmakers doing different things, and trying to play with genre conventions and taking the outlines of one story and trying to do something different with it. I have no problem with what Flanagan was trying to do, and you can sometimes see flashes of how great this series might have been if certain choices had been made differently. But they weren’t, and here we are, and for me Midnight Mass missed the mark.
