Midnight Mass

Ever since I first heard of Midnight Mass I knew it’d work like a charm on me, I was a big fan of Flanagan’s House of Usher series and I’ve been especially addicted to cult stuff recently (i just can’t stop watching youtube documentaries) so naturally this highly acclaimed supernatural religious thriller from Flanagan would attract me but even with those expectations I wasn’t at all prepared for this philosophical horror journey he was about to bring me on. I haven’t gotten the chance to take in all that much of Flanagan’s writing, my only experience with his ability was that House of Usher series and even though that was well written I didn’t see this level of magic coming, every of the seven episodes has three or more fantastically written monologues and the way the script made me think throughout the series warrants the utmost praise for Flanagan. And although a lot of the cast did just well enough with the script to show how fantastic it was there were three I thought matched the brilliance, those being Hamish Linklater in the most powerful role of the series which he excelled with, Zach Gilford who’s only impressed me more and more in each role with this being the best I’ve seen so far, and my favorite performance of the whole series (with Linklater coming very close) is Samantha Sloyan who just stole every single scene she had. This was also a fantastic display of how to create an eerie atmosphere, the slow-burn drama of the early story sets up the climax (which is basically the whole of the last three episodes) beautifully and the scares, like House of Usher in this sense, felt perfectly placed and never felt in any way forced for shock value which is already becoming one of my favorite things about Flanagan as a horror writer/director. The story is absolutely wild and touches on some really interesting points of religious philosophy by setting up some great conversations between personalities, most effectively for this point the way Riley interacted with Father Paul and Erin with the believer vs. atheist dynamic, I loved that I could feel the sincerity in both sides of the arguments. I’d go into the story deeper and talk about some of the actual plot-points but I don’t want to spoiler tag this, it’s an absolutely marvelous display of atmospheric filmmaking with a brilliant philosophically rich script that keeps you thinking and wows you at every turn, Midnight Mass is without a doubt a new mini-series favorite of mine and only adds to the excitement I already had to see what else Mike Flanagan and this crew have made over the years.