Midnight Mass Review
Midnight Mass is a seven-episode limited series created by Mike Flanagan for Netflix. According to IMDB, the synopsis for the show is “The tale of a small, isolated island community whose existing divisions are amplified by the return of a disgraced young man and the arrival of a charismatic priest. When Father Paul’s appearance on Crockett Island coincides with unexplained and seemingly miraculous events, a renewed religious fervor takes hold of the community – but do these miracles come at a price?” After finishing the seventh episode, I can confidently say that the experience of watching this show is something that I won’t forget for a long time.
What makes the show stick with me the most are the characters. The show does a great job of giving the audience enough time to connect with them. They all have great depth, and the sign for me of great characterization is feeling like you know how a character will react in a given situation. The show’s setting is on a tiny remote island with only about a hundred residents; as an audience member, one can tell that these people have been together for a long time. I love little remarks that they make about each other that feel like gossip in a small community like the one they live in. The island that the show is set in felt real and lived-in.
As the show progresses, the setting helps add to the sense of horror. It feels like the characters were bound to one place with numerous shots of the entire island, reminding us how small it is. There’s also dialogue from the characters talking about traveling out to the mainland, which is a place that we don’t see. I thought it was a great choice not to show the mainland since it helped develop the sense of isolation.
Midnight Mass is a horror-themed show, but I would not say that it’s a thriller. Horror today has become synonymous with thrillers because of movies like The Conjuring or Insidious. What makes this show horror is the playing of fears that everybody has, such as paranoia, isolation, panic, and hysteria. They manage to create these feelings in the viewer over time.
A common complaint from people I’ve talked to who’ve seen the show is that they felt that it was a little slow, and they had too many scenes of extended monologues. I agree that the series was a little monotonous, but I didn’t feel this was an issue since I knew it was done to develop the characters. Everything paid off in the end since it made me feel invested in the conclusion of each of their stories. I also enjoyed the characters’ monologues, primarily since it was well written and came at appropriate times.
Before I get into spoilers, I would like to wrap up my thoughts on Midnight Mass. It is a great show that I would recommend to almost everyone. However, I feel like this is a case where I have to preface by saying, “give it a couple episodes,” since the pace is pretty slow.
Short spoiler section for Midnight Mass Review
The show’s last three episodes are nearly perfect, with the events feeling tense and satisfying in the conclusion. I loved the ending for almost every character, but there was one little thing that I felt could have been handled better. In the final episode, after the town had turned to vampires, Mildred Gunning, the old woman, walks back into the church and joins the pastor after being attacked by the main vampire. The two sit and talk about how they wished things were different between them when they were younger. This conversation revealed that the pastor is the father of Mildred’s daughter. A couple of scenes later, the pastor catches his daughter attempting to light the church on fire, and he tells her that he is her father shortly before she is killed by one of the townspeople. Mildred and the pastor take her body to the bridge she loved as a child before the sunrise turns everyone to ash. While I love how the pastor felt remorseful for his actions, in the end, I thought that this all should have happened sooner.
Unless this happened sooner and I didn’t realize it, the pastor being the father is revealed at the very end, giving the audience much time to process this information. I felt that this and the idea that the pastor nearly quit being a pastor for her should have happened earlier. It’s implied that they had a history, but I thought that the two were just friends, not that they were in love at some point. For him to give up his faith in the end also confused me since the entire show, he was presented as someone with unwavering devotion to the point where he brought the vampire to the island. These are just minor complaints to an already great story, and I am curious if anyone felt the way I did. It still doesn’t change my feelings while watching the sun rise over the burning island.