Midnight Mass review

Midnight Mass did an excellent job of pulling the rug out from under me. I thought that I had a pretty good idea of the premise of the new Netflix horror thriller, and of the direction that the show would go in, but I was very pleasantly surprised by the actual route it took. As I trekked through the 7 episode mini-series, I quickly learned that whatever I thought Midnight Mass would be about is not what Midnight Mass ended up being about. The show had all the makings of a demonic/Anti-Christ type show. It ran a great play-action and completely fooled me instead with a nice mid-series twist.

Midnight Mass follows Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford), as he is newly released from prison after spending 4 years behind bars for killing a teenager in a drunk driving accident. Coinciding with Riley’s release is the arrival of Father Paul (Hamish Linklater), a charming, but mysterious priest from out of town who is temporarily replacing Monsignor Pruitt. It’s apparent that Father Paul isn’t who he seems, and the story has all the makings of a demon-in-disguise story. Miracles start happening soon after Father Paul’s arrival to support this theory. The show continues to lead you by the hand, lulling you in right before making you fall into a perfectly placed boobytrap.

The show has a great twist. There is a monster behind the strange happenstances but instead of it being a demon, it’s actually an angel. The angel is monstrous, however, which feels like a paradox, but it is indeed technically one of the good guys. This is powerful because the angel is far short of anything typically depicted as angelic. In fact, it’s most similar to a vampire. Yet, it is a vessel of God and is “good”, despite being scary and doing lots of awful things throughout the series. Midnight Mass significantly distorts the concept of good and bad and villain and hero.

Midnight Mass really strikes a chord with me because the Book of Revelations always read like a horror novel. That sounds sacrilegious but I mean no disrespect. The imagery in Revelations is hellish and terrifying and always scared me as a kid. There’s a frightening war that takes place between God and The Anti-Christ which reads like a screenplay from an apocalyptic horror film. Midnight Mass does a great job of capturing this terrifying end-of-time imagery, that is often not portrayed on screen in non-apocalyptic storylines. Instead of following the tradition of depicting angels as soft, empathetic and communicative, Midnight Mass depicts an angel that ironically resembles a demon and is non-verbal with a propensity for gruesome violence. Demons are depicted as fallen angels in the Bible, but never before are their physical appearances in such alignment with one another. The only difference between the two is what side they’re on.

Angels and Christian mystics are frequently depicted as patient, kind, long-suffering pacifists, but in reality (as depicted in the Bible and for those who believe), these figures are soldiers of God who are intense and not here for the bullshit. There’s no room or time for meekness. Father Paul is played superbly by Hamish Linklater. He captures this duality well, showing true leadership, compassion, and faith but also delving into amoral acts as well; such as lying, impersonation and even murder. This works because Father Paul and the angel-monster don’t take a holier-than-thou/self-righteous approach but rather, the message in the series is that these acts are the inevitable collateral damage of carrying out God’s work as God’s lieutenants.

Shows like Salem and even Carrie have portrayed the evil of Christian purists before, but Midnight Mass is distinctive from these two mediums, because Father Paul isn’t a villain, even though, admittedly, he does spend significant time in the moral gray are. Even the angel acts villainous, but an argument can be made that it’s not necessarily a villain per se.

Midnight Mass is sandwhiched in between the shockingly successful and culturally impactful, Squid Game, and the Penn Badlgey led third season of You, one of the best and most popular shows on Netflix. This has subsequently resulted in the show flying under the radar. Midnight Mass tells a classic small-town mystery. It’s set on an island town that’s segregated from the coast; the seclusion providing the show with additional tension and anxiety. Religious stories almost exclusively pit their protagonist against a demon, cult or some sort of deity. Midnight Mass took a brazen chance and had an angel as its protagonist instead.

Wonderous miracles take place, but they come at a steep price in the form of admittance in the Army of the Lord. Midnight Mass is a well-paced seven-episode mini-series that doesn’t take too long to get going, making it binge-able. The show is bold beyond its overall storyline as it takes chances with its characters. Midnight Mass took a page out of the Game of Thrones playbook, making every character open to death.

Midnight Mass is a very solid show without a lot of major flaws or deficiencies. It’s set on a tiny island town, so the setting could be off-putting and maybe even boring to some, but I didn’t have an issue with its location. If viewers see it through, they’ll see why the setting is necessary. Riley Flynn’s character and storyline was probably the weakest aspect of the show. Midnight Mass needed a broken main character in need of penance to put the spotlight on. Riley’s backstory afforded him close proximity with Father Paul and an eventual insight into who he truly is, but from a macro-level view this wasn’t necessary for the overall plot. In a show that took chances, it would have been great to have seen them go full throttle with daring choices and have the main character be the Muslim outsider, Sherriff Hassan or even Erin, the wayward pregnant woman who finds her way back home. Seeing things from their POV would have fully embraced Midnight Show as the unique mini-series it is. Regardless, the show is solid and flips the script on classic religious horror.

-------8.0/10