Netflix has been generous to Mike Flanagan over the last five years, and the consequence of that generosity is style dilation. Flanagan spent the early stages of his career directing movies like “Absentia,” “Oculus,” “Hush,” and “Before I Wake,” small-scale horror efforts with distinctly human hearts; he wasn’t the first filmmaker to care about his cast of victims-in-waiting, but compassion was his prize ingredient, the quality he expressed even at each movie’s peak of suspense. Now, he’s the “The Haunting” guy, whether it’s “Hill House” or “Bly Manor,” and the “Doctor Sleep” guy, which by now makes him the de facto “Stephen King if Stephen King isn’t available” guy. Flanagan’s compassion remains, but the gulf between his past and present is so great as to be stultifying.
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His new Netflix series, “Midnight Mass,” is inevitably the most and least Flanagan-y project he’s ever tackled. The show’s DNA is partly his and partly King’s, the humanity that’s so critical to the Flanagan brand is present, the scares pierce our nerves like a nail through the foot, and the scale outmatches the plot. “Midnight Mass” is a theoretically intimate tale about atonement, loss, self-acceptance, economic repression, unrequited love, and a variety of things that go “bump” in the night. The things’ eyes tend to glow in pitch darkness. That’s classically terrifying. The rest tends to subsume the glowing eyes, which is the contemporary expectation both studios and audiences have for all marquee horror productions: Horror, whether film or television, can’t just be horror, it must also be self-conscious drama.
This is a problem, and a sticky one, too, because taken as an array of component parts, “Midnight Mass” is a handsome, affecting piece of work. Flanagan isn’t a hack. He isn’t clumsy at the keyboard or graceless behind the camera. He gives a damn and refuses to half-ass his material with shortcuts or apathetic craftsmanship. But whole-assing aside, there’s a point where a good thing does become way, way too much, and while Flanagan has managed neither to reach nor exceed that point during his relationship with Netflix, “Midnight Mass” finally sees him stumble beyond that invisible line. It’s too sad. It’s too explicit. It’s too self-serious. It’s too prestigious. It’s too Flanagan. Somehow, here, that eponymous adjective is a bug and not a feature.
“Midnight Mass” is set on Crockett Island, a remote place that a scant 127 souls call home; depending on your regional prejudices (and whether you put much stock in the fact that Salem is Flanagan’s hometown), you may either peg this as coastal New York state or New England. Wherever Crockett Island exists, it’s seen better days, which is just a pretty way of calling it a decrepit and miserable wen on the arse of the Atlantic. There is no vitality on Crockett. Every inch of the place—from wilds to civilization—is hanging by a thread, the echoing aftermath of various calamities that have befallen both the land and its residents, including an oil spill from years past that receives routine but casually dismissive mention over the first few episodes.
The series concerns itself with a couple of key figures. First, Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford), met in the premiere’s opening sequence (“Book I: Genesis”) as he stares a dead girl in the eyes. Riley drove drunk and got a young woman killed, then spent four years behind bars before finally, finally returning home to Crockett, a larger prison but a prison nonetheless, to reunite with his family, his mother Annie (Kristin Lehman), younger brother Warren (Igby Rigney), and father Ed (Henry Thomas). Next, there’s Father Paul (Hamish Linklater), arriving on Crockett to replace its missing monsignor, who apparently took ill on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and is recovering on the mainland. For anyone who has ever seen a horror movie ever, much less one of Flanagan’s, Paul has something to hide. But what?
That’s the chief mystery driving the plot in “Midnight Mass,” which is so laser-focused on the respective grief of just about every single person living on Crockett Island that the mystery tends to dissolve into the background. There’s never a sense that Flanagan considers the mystery an afterthought. There is a sense that character is a distraction for him, like a dog chasing a car, and the question raised by the dog’s fixation on the car is the same raised by Flanagan’s fixation on character: Once the car is caught, once the character is explored, what now?
Scoffing at Flanagan’s faculty for composition and gift for working with actors is foolish. These talents are proudly evident in “Midnight Mass,” and in fact, his writing (facilitated by collaborators like Dani Parker and Flanagan’s brother, James Flanagan) perhaps has never been sharper. In Episode 4, “Book IV: Lamentations,” Riley sits down with his forever crush, Erin (Kate Siegel), on a particularly somber eve and each tells the other their definition of and vision for Heaven in an exchange that one day, maybe years from now, maybe decades, will rank as one of the best Flanagan ever staged. Picking through the details of this conversation, a contrast between the scientific and the spiritual, would give away too much. The dialogue’s unimpeachable power must be experienced blind.
But that power also points to the series’ greatest weakness: Elevating its genre. It is true that horror exists on a spectrum with high art at one end and junk at the other, so to pretend that “Midnight Mass” is the first horror story told with mannered tastefulness is to concede that you don’t watch much horror. At the same time, the budding aesthetic that overdetermines horror’s subtext through self-conscious artfulness was anointed as the genre’s “new” expression back around 2018, and this aesthetic puts horror second to lofty explorations of human trauma, as if trauma is a stranger to horror. (It is traumatic to be chased through the woods by a masked killer. Trauma is to horror what air is to all of us.) Flanagan isn’t the pretentious, but if the series’ horror elements were cut away—the glowing eyes, the obscured figures lurking in shadows, the shoreline’s worth of dead cats serving as a buffet for seagulls—it would still function as blue-collar nostalgie de la boue, a narrative so steeped in the working-class struggle that frankly whatever’s out there in the shadows is probably less frightening than the prospect of living on society’s edge.
Flanagan ultimately overstates the various cases he makes in “Midnight Mass,” whether on the topics of God and organized religion, or the lifelong journey toward forgiveness, both from others and for oneself. The series unintentionally talks at its viewers instead of to them. There’s much to savor here, too, which makes the oversized sense of purpose and meaning frustrating. “Midnight Mass” has something to say. It just can’t help saying it too loudly—and without bothering to stop and spook us out. [C-]
“Midnight Mass” is available now on Netflix.
