The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The small fishing town on Crockett Island is dying, literally and metaphorically. A few years back an oil spill occurred off the coast which ruined the local economy. The majority of locals left for better opportunity, the last of them did not even attempt to sell their house. They simply abandoned it. The population is now 127, those too old to move away, or haunted by such pasts that make living in a dying place seem a good penance for past sins. The local church, a Catholic diocese by the name of St. Patrick’s, is led by an octogenarian monsignor. We are told that he was becoming senile and wished to see the Holy Land before he passed, so the church pooled its resources and paid for his pilgrimage. We never meet the monsignor. Instead, a virile well-spoken young man (played by Hamish Linklater) steps off the boat. He is explains to the congregation that the old monsignor has taken ill and is resting in a mainland hospital. His name is Father Paul Hill (there is an important biblical connotation to the neame) and he will be here for only several weeks. He expects his time to take the community through Ash Wednesday, Lent, Holy Week, and then Easter, that sacred time of repentance and death, forgiveness and resurrection.
Midnight Mass is not a movie and I did not see it in a theater. Those two conditions are generally the prerequisite for a review on this blog. I am writing this review because, well, Midnight Mass is the best anything that I saw from 2021. It is a mini-series, eight one-hour episodes, that can be seen on Netflix. Ostensibly it is in the horror genre (and it should be), but let that fool you. It is arguably the best and most artful meditation on religious faith, religious zealotry, sin, forgiveness, and redemption. It is also as scary as death.
At eight hours, it is the correct length. The one-hour episodes take their time, exploring Crockett Island and its inhabitants in depth. The roles are an actor’s paradise. There is not one main character, but several, and each character has at least one great scene that should make all the other actors jealous for having missed being a part of it. The endings of each episodes are at the same time cliff-hangers that make one want to move on immediately to the next episode but also welcome respites that allow the viewer to pause, take stock of what they witnessed, and think on it. You should probably see it alone lest the experience be not ruined by less patient companions who may not be in the mood to watch a good movie.
I watched “Midnight Mass” entirely cold (that is knowing nothing of its plot) based on a review from Red Letter Media in which the reviewers made a sincere effort to not talk about the plot as well because they went in cold, had an incredible experience, and wanted to preserve the same for their audience. For that reason, I am going to be incredibly vague as well as to what happens. I won’t even tell you what the horror element is, though you may find yourself already familiar with it once you realized what it could be. All I will say is that I was surprised by how this element and its rules which I have seen in many contexts (including teen romcoms) fits so well into the theology of Catholicism, in particular those parts wherein the Church insists that it does not deal in metaphors. The Eucharist is my body. The wine is my blood. Drink of it and you will have eternal life. The Church teaches that this is not a metaphor. In this miniseries, it really isn’t.
Midnight Mass was written, directed, and created by Matt Flanagan. I have no previous knowledge of this artist. I looked him up and immediately understood why. He does almost exclusively horror television shows (The Haunting of Hill House for one) and I don’t really watch those. He has done some movies, like Ouiji 2, but I would never see that either. He mostly has done adaptations. Midnight Mass though is original and Mike Flanagan in interviews says that he has wanted to make it forever. It feels like that. It feels like a story someone has spent ten years thinking about. I recognized almost none of the actors here for the same reason. Apparently, Mike Flanagan uses the same actors a lot and these particular actors like Kate Seigel, Kristin Lehman, Samantha Sloyan, Igby Rigney, Rahul Kohli, Robert Longstreet are all in Mike Flanagan’s other TV series. I look forward to seeing more of them acting together. The two actors that I was familiar with were Zach Gilford who I remember from Friday Night Lights and Hamish Linklater, who I know from NYC’s Shakespeare in the Park (I have seen him in Twelfth Night, A Comedy of Errors, and as Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing. He is a great thespian).
It is impossible to tell what the Church would think about Midnight Mass and I hope it says very little, if anything at all. I’m sure there is plenty to be offended about here. At the same time, the Church should welcome great art that takes theology seriously. There is a cautionary history here when it comes to the responses of religious institutions to religious movies. The best example is Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Here was a serious movie made by a devout Catholic that took seriously certain aspects of theology, explored them, and in so doing, was probably heretical in some ways. The movie was met with controversy and picket lines. In response, Hollywood studios, wanting to duck controversy, stopped making movies with distinctly religious themes for several decades. In the recent pass, really only Mel Gibson and Martin Scorsese continue to make distinctly religious films. I do not know of any great controversy or furor over Midnight Mass (maybe because it is but a miniseries on a streaming platform) and I hope that lack of controversy persuades more producers to take chances on more movies and TV shows that have directly religious themes.
The horror genre is having its own resurrection. It is a sign of the health of the movie industry when good horror movies coming out. Arguably the best period in American movies took place in the 1970s and it was not a coincidence that period had many great horror movies (Jaws, Alien, The Exorcist, Halloween, Dawn of the Dead, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Thing, Evil Dead). It is happening again. Good horror movies are a good trend in the business because these movies are generally made by young people with no money and deal with inherently risky subject matter. When good horror movies are being made in quantity it speaks to a wealth of opportunity for new artistic voices in the culture. The powers that be are taking chances on the youth and the youth are delivering with something new and profound experiences and giving. Midnight Mass is the best of them.
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