Conner’s Critiques – Midnight Mass

Hey, folks! Jim here, taking over for my colleague Connor to bring you my take on Midnight Mass.

As per the usual format, we’re going to tackle this review in 3 parts; Story, Acting and Overall. One benefit to reviewing this a little bit after it’s out is that I can venture into slightly more spoiler-ish territory without fear of ruining it for you before you’ve had the chance to see it. So. Consider this a warning! Spoilers lie ahead.

STORY: 5/10

So. Here’s the thing.

There’s so much that I love about this series. But those things just cast the parts I couldn’t vibe with in a worse light. It starts out so promisingly; we have a tragic protagonist (Riley Flynn) coming home after one terrible drunken accident ruined his life and ended someone elses. He’s been in prison and has nowhere else to go upon release barring his home town which is a small fishing village on Crockett island. His reintegration into this community is tense and awkward and I loved it. Riley is a fantastic character and a perfect proxy for us as an audience to get to know this town.

Another character of note at this time is the new Priest, Father Paul. He’s young, charismatic, intelligent, compassionate and immediately beloved by everyone. He plays off of Beverly Keene, his most fervent parishioner, perfectly. This woman is an archetype you love to hate – cherry-picking parts of her faith to justify truly horrific acts. Like poisoning a dog literally because it looked at her funny. (My general rule when approaching any character is, if you kill a dog, you need to face some kind of divine justice.)

You have the new Sheriff in town and his son – devout Muslims in a town which is otherwise entirely Catholic. You have the town Doctor who’s also at odds with this religious environment due to her sexual orientation. Riley has to attend A. A. meetings on the mainland due to the conditions of his parole but Father Paul offers to host them on the Island to save Riley the ferry trip every week and through this we get to better know Joe, a man who (Much like Riley) got drunk one night and did something he’s lived to regret every day of his life since. Then there’s Erin Greene, also someone who left the Island and came back under less than ideal circumstances. She’s a teacher and expecting a child of her own, but born… Out of Wedlock!? The scandal! What I’m getting at is, these are richly written, interesting characters in a wonderfully tense situation.

This set up, by all accounts, is fantastic. It’s a slam dunk. So many amazing elements to create a story from… but once the supernatural elements come in, it all falls apart. I didn’t believe that Father Paul Hill could be beholden to what turns out to be the ‘real’ antagonist of the series. Nothing in the way he talks, the way he works, the way he’s portrayed leads me to believe he can believe any of what happens next is ordained by God. The way it’s handled breaks the rules they’ve set up for how this guy functions and it took me out of the experience right away which is unfortunate because up to that point, I was deeply invested.

ACTING: 9/10

Despite my gripes with the writing and eventual direction of the story, the people playing these characters are amazing. Rahul Kohli as Sheriff Hassan gave me someone to root for immediately. His kindness coupled with his general suffering is just so endearing to me. He even had an amazing twinge to his accent – as someone who moved to America from elsewhere I know about this all too well. You start to pick up little bits of the accent from the people you live and work with every day and there’s this point where the way you talk is a mish-mash of your old accent and the new one that’s developing organically. He nails this perfectly and it makes him feel like that much more of an outsider.

Zach Gilford as Riley is so tragic and quiet and you spend most of your time just wanting to reassure him that he isn’t the sum of his past mistakes and can move on. The sequences where he lays down to sleep and can’t stop seeing the face of the woman he killed while drunk driving are haunting. Genuinely disquieting. The tired, resigned look on his face as red and blue lights slowly appear in shot is honestly pretty affecting.

Hamish Linklater plays Paul Hill and he does an amazing job at being a Priest that even I, as an Atheist, find immediately, intensely likable. You can feel his desire to help in every word he speaks and I guess it’s that desire to help that gets twisted and perverted over the course of the story. In short, he’s my second favorite TV Priest right after Father Dougal McGuire.

Samantha Sloyan does her job as Beverly Keene perfectly. In my eyes, she’s the real evil of this series. A true villain through and through. You know and love to loathe this archetype – Dolores Umbridge, Annie Wilkes. She wants so desperately to be seen as capital G “Good” and powerful and RIGHT, but it’s all a veneer hiding an inner darkness that she revels in, if only secretly and probably subconsciously.

It was awesome to see Annabeth Gish again! Folks who love genre TV will probably remember her as the criminally underrated Monica Reyes in later seasons of The X Files. She does a great job as Dr. Sarah Gunning who starts out as a bit of a smaller player, but becomes a focal point toward the end of the series.

OVERALL: 7.5/10

Cinematography, dialogue, theming in the early part of the story are all amazing. Tense, off-center silences alternate with beautifully written monologues on faith, community, grief, responsibility. And you’d expect nothing less, right? Created by Mike Flanagan, who’s prior works The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor (Both on Netflix) are… well, haunting, to say the least. He also directed Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep which were great films based on Stephen King’s writing.

And I think there’s a pretty good quote from Stephen King himself that sheds some light on why I couldn’t rate this higher. In his book On Writing – A Memoir of the Craft he states:

    “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s. When it comes to actually pulling this off, the writer is much more fortunate than the filmmaker, who is almost always doomed to show too much… including, in nine cases out of ten, the zipper running up the monster’s back.”

It didn’t much surprise me that, in researching for this review, I discovered that the original intention for this story was, in fact, a novel. I think it would have worked better that way. The way the villain of the piece (Not the monster of the piece. That honor goes to Bev Keene.) is represented visually didn’t have the impact for me I’m sure it was intended to. It kind of reminded me of King Shark in the CW’s Flash show.

Conner Jim’s Final Thought(s):

Despite my grumbling, though, I still recommend you watch it.

Why?

Well. I finished watching it well over a week ago and it’s taken me this long to hammer out my thoughts on it and I still find it coming to mind, even now. Scenes replay in my head. That’s got to say something about the parts that I enjoyed, right? If you have any interest at all in film making, there’s a lot to deconstruct here; lighting, palette, use of negative space and framing. There’s a lot of great stuff to enjoy in that regard. So. Give it a look.

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