Midnight Mass (2021)

Day 101 of Sobriety. 

So, this is my first post of the new year, and my first after an almost two-week hiatus due to having a ten-day holiday (unusually-long for me) over the new-year period, during which I allowed myself to fall into a blissful routine of doing almost nothing productive every day—including writing for this blog.

That doesn’t mean that I didn’t watch any horror movies, though—far from it. By my reckoning, I watched over twenty horror films during that period (and quite a few non-horror movies too)—including a trip to the cinema to see Eli Roth’s rather good Thanksgiving. Part of me feels that I should backtrack and write about some of the films I watched, but due to the limited time I have, I will refrain from doing that and move ever onwards.

My period of absence also included my 100th day of sobriety—something of a small milestone, I suppose.

Anyway, I digress.

Midnight Mass is not actually a movie, but a TV series, released by Netflix. It was directed by Mike Flanigan, whose Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016) I also saw recently. He has also directed a number of other well-known and well-received horror films, including an adaptation of Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep (2019), but he is perhaps best known for his Netflix series, including The Haunting of Hill House (2018), The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), and The Fall of the House of Usher (2023).

This is my second time to watch Midnight Mass, having seen it shortly after it was released. The re-viewing was prompted by my picking up (for an excellent price) a copy of the series’ soundtrack on vinyl—a very nice three-disc set, with each disc pressed on different-colored marbled vinyl. The music is pretty good too. The first disc is pretty straight choral renditions of Christian hymns (although, to my ears they have something strangely Simon and Garfunkle-ish about their harmonies), and, to be honest, I will not be listening to that much, but the second and third discs are filled with excellent atmospheric ambient pieces.

As far as I could remember, I was not overly impressed with my first viewing of Midnight Mass, but I still wanted to check it out again, as I was enjoying the music so much, and also, I remembered that it dealt with alcoholism and sobriety in a pretty in-depth way. And of course, I was drinking when I watched it the first time, so I couldn’t remember much of the plot details.

The story is essentially about a very small, isolated, and devoutly Christian island community, which begins to experience strange events—some miraculous and some terrifying—after a new priest arrives at their community church. To describe it like that, however, is to gloss over all of the aspects of the story that, in my opinion, really make it interesting, such as the story of the young ex-alcoholic who returns to the community after serving a jail sentence for a killing someone in drunk-driving incident, the story of the young woman who left the island to forge a new, less restricted life, but returned alone and pregnant to face the disapproval of the small, conservative community, and the stories of the many other vividly-painted characters.

For about the first three or four of the series’ seven episodes, I was wondering why on Earth my recollection of it had been so negatively tinged. It was truly superb—the small island community in which it is set is drawn richly and with incredible skill. The characters are three-dimensional and believable, and the whole thing is beautifully photographed with, as I have already mentioned, an excellent musical score.

The dialogue and plotting of those earlier episodes is very realistic and engaging, dealing intelligently and insightfully with topics such as addiction, recovery, religion, redemption, family, love, and loss. Throughout those episodes, the horror elements of the plot are really just lurking on the sidelines, and the nuanced human drama of the characters’ lives is given center stage.

And then, as we pass the half-way mark, it all starts to tumble downhill.

I ended up having exactly the same problem with Midnight Mass as I did with Ouija: Origin of Evil. After the excellent set-up establishing a wonderfully-drawn world and characters, the plot shifts onto the horror elements, which are, in my opinion, handled in a way that is nowhere near as sophisticated and accomplished as the human drama elements. It gradually devolves into a heavy-handed cliché-ridden creature feature, and ultimately borders on action-movie territory. All sense of realism and credibility is dashed, characters start to behave in ways that you know you could only possible see in “the movies,” and even the dialogue, which up until that point had been illuminating aspects of the human condition with a great deal of  sensitivity and finesse starts to become more strident and overwrought.

I guess Mike Flanigan likes his stories to go out with a bang. I get that. They are horror films after all—something has to happen. But I don’t know… it’s just not for me. As I mentioned in my post about The Boogeyman (2023), this seems to be a common pattern in modern horror films: an obligation to completely jump the shark at the end.

So, my recommendation would certainly be to watch Midnight Mass, as many aspects of it are truly brilliant, but just be sure to fully appreciate the first half!

I guess I would be remiss if I did not mention here that both the director, Mike Flanigan, and the lead actress (and his wife), Kate Siegel are both ex-alcoholics who are now committed to sobriety. They are both very open to talking about their former addictions and their recovery in the media. Mike Flanigan himself made the decision to kick booze while filming Doctor Sleep. In his blog, he wrote:

When I think of DOCTOR SLEEP, I think of Ewan sitting at the bar and looking at the glass in his hand. “Man takes a drink, drink takes a drink… and then the drink takes the man. Ain’t it so, dad.”

Ewan understood those words better than I did when I typed them into the script. I understand them much better now.

I reached out to King a year later, on my first sober birthday. I hadn’t told him I was sober, but it felt like time to do it. I got to thank him. “I never told you this, but I sobered up while we were shooting DOCTOR SLEEP, and I don’t think I would have done it without your words. Living in that story, and marinading in the concepts of recovery and redemption made it possible. I just want to thank you.”

He wrote back his congratulations, and then mentioned “as it happens, I’m off to celebrate 30 years myself. It only gets better and better.”

Amen to that.