Created by Mike Flanagan
All episodes directed by Mike Flanagan
Streaming on Netflix

by Kevin Bresnahan, Contributor

Horror is a kind of religion, depending as it does on the belief that the supernatural is always close by, that humans live (and die) at the whim of timeless forces beyond the reach of reason. So it makes sense that when Mike Flanagan, the filmmaker responsible for the excellent The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, set out to make his latest project, he placed the locus of horror in a church.

Specifically the Roman Catholic Church. Like many of us, Flanagan grew up Catholic but outgrew it young, like a pair of Toughskins. Still, the rhythms and poetry of Catholicism are sticky, and Midnight Mass is haunted with the liturgy, the rites, and especially the music of the Church.

This seven episode Netflix series take place on Crockett Island, a once-thriving fishing community now down on its heels after a devastating oil spill that wiped out the fishing grounds. A few hundred souls struggle to endure on what they lovingly and ruefully call the “Crock Pot,” but it’s become clear to the younger generation that the only way up is to get out.

Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford) was one of those kids. Off to college and then on to the turbulent seas of venture capital and the big city, he had left it all behind until one night when it all goes wrong, and he drunkenly takes a life. Four years later he is released from prison and heads for the only place he can go: Home.

The island is desolate, its only connection to the mainland the daily ferries. In a scattering of battered cottages, the paint long-since sandblasted from the buckled clapboards, the community huddles close around Saint Patrick's Church and tells itself stories about the old days.

But there is something new in town, a fresh face, the young priest Father Paul Hill, played by Hamish Linklater in what is the best of a whole slew of fantastic performances.

From the start we are pretty sure that there is more than meets the eye to this Father Paul, but Linklater’s honest, humane portrayal is so subtle, so humble, so genuinely christian that, like Fox Mulder, we want to believe.

If ever a little hope was needed it is on Crockett Island. The stern, hard-scrabble lives of these decent people have been dislocated by disasters both human and environmental, but they trudge on, just looking for a little light in the darkness.

“Be not afraid,” Father Paul assures them, in the words of the old hymn. The injunction not to fear is the oldest of religious ideas. The phrase, or its variants, appear 365 times in the King James Bible. “Be not afraid,” he says.

Which is when the little voice inside your head starts quoting Geena Davis, from The Fly.

Riley is still haunted by the innocent life he took. The lighting trick which Flanagan and cinematographer Michael Fimognari employ to remind us of his nightly torment is the simplest of touches, but it hits like a hammer. At the behest of his father, an artfully incommunicative Henry Thomas (damn, I’m old), Riley reluctantly agrees to accompany his parents to church, but he refuses Communion out of a lingering intuition that he is not in a state of grace. Riley is the only one in town who does not drink the Kool-Aid, as it were.

Even so he can’t help but be a little impressed when Father Paul’s message of love and hope begin to spread. These people are broken in so many ways, and Father Paul’s simple honest faith seems to heal them. Figuratively, of course, but also, in one stunning scene, literally as well.

Yet as it turns out, of course, there are no Edens without snakes. We should have known.

I love a limited series. Give me six or eight episodes any day, with a beginning, a middle and, that most elusive of TV tropes, a proper ending. For so long the old networks insisted on spinning every idea out over seven seasons to gobble up the syndication dollars. It’s one of the great boons of Peak TV that we let good filmmakers tell discrete stories and then close them out.

Flanagan’s writing is consistently on the money here, not least in the long monologues as characters confront big questions about life, faith, addiction, and pain. Some viewers have complained that these soliloquies are too slow and put a stop to the action, and they are quite right. They are also beautifully written and skillfully delivered. Liking Midnight Mass and not liking the monologues is a bit like liking Star Wars but not liking spaceships.

Among other things, Midnight Mass is a clinic on how to use music in TV. There is a scene when the islanders march in an Easter vigil, carrying candles through the dark and singing the old hymn “Holy God We Praise Thy Name,” that gets closer to understanding the musical enchantment of faith as anything I’ve ever seen. Singing, to these people, is a kind of belief.

But the real show-stopper comes part way through episode 3, just as the hopeful changes are beginning to take hold in these grim, thwarted lives, when Flanagan turns out a lovely montage of healing backed up by, of all things, Neil Diamond’s “Holly Holy,” that is so fucking moving that I, a) cried like a child, and b) spent a few hours on YouTube reconsidering my dismissal of all things Diamond.

The details of Catholic worship are perfect, from the awkward shuffling sound of the congregation taking their seats at the end of the hymn, to the soft susurrus in the middle of the Our Father.

Flanagan calls this his most personal project, one he’s been trying to make for twenty years. He’s grappling with Catholicism, I suppose. Full disclosure, I was raised Catholic, too, albeit casually so, my parents not being the militant type. I bailed on God about eighteen months after I got the word on Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. It was basically a domino effect. But I never stormed out of the church in indignation; I floated away on a cloud of indifference. There just wasn’t anything there I seemed to need. I didn’t hate the church, I found it redundant. Still, as Lenin said, if you get them young, you got them. The old rhythms stay with you.

In Midnight Mass, without being excessively spoilerish, the central ritual of the church itself, the consumption of the true flesh and blood at Communion – Christ, just typing that makes me see how fucked up it all is – the essence of the Catholic Mass itself, is turned into the source of evil.

It’s at this point you realize that this is the most Catholic TV show ever made. Midnight Mass makes Touched by An Angel look like Seinfeld.

The cast is very, very good. Zach Gilford as Riley shows us a man as dismal as a man can be, but with an edge of cheek that helps keep the mumblecore to a minimum. Robert Longstreet as the town drunk, and Samantha Sloyan as the fundamentalist villain of the piece, both come from Mike Flanagan’s traveling repertory company, having already worked for him in the “Haunting Of” shows. Rahul Kohli nails it as the only non-Christian on the island, except for maybe Annabeth Gish as the gay rationalist doctor.

Also picking up a little more work from Flanagan after The Haunting of Hill House is the luminous Kate Siegel, as Erin Greene, around whom the plot will, in the end, spin. Erin and Riley were the only two cool kids back in high school, and both escaped the island, only to suffer losses on the outside and, tail between legs, return to Crockett Island. There they tentatively, haltingly, achingly, find each other again. Their final scene together will not dislodge itself from my brain.

The whole thing is so artfully done, so human, that you’ve almost convinced yourself that Midnight Mass is one of those literary horror pieces where the real monster turns out to be inside all of us.

But it isn’t. The Beast, when it appears, almost seems out of place in this gently rendered world. It doesn’t care, though. It’s been freed from millennia of imprisonment, and it’s hungry.

The show succeeds because the characters, the people, come alive for us. The finale gets crazy, and very, very bloody. But the moment that brings it all home is when Erin commits an act, a gesture of hideous intimacy, that will be familiar to readers of John 15:13.

When this blood-soaked Easter Vigil is over, the broken ones, briefly made whole, will be lame again. It is a function of the power of this show, the way it has rejected easy answers, that we are inclined to celebrate this.