Midnight Mass Is More Boring Than Church
Cool painting. Bad show. Image from Collider.com
By C. A. Ramirez
Worse than an evangelical PTA meeting whose agenda is, “loud rap and the problems that come with it”, Midnight Mass has all the bells and whistles of a TV series that must have looked fantastic on paper. The series quickly grabs hold of the viewer, straps them down, tapes their eyelids open, and proceeds to saturate every one of their senses with enough holier-than-thou boredom to fill the Grand Canyon. Midnight Mass suffers from, what I like to call, “Phantom Menace Syndrome”, where depth and interest are absent from nearly every character in the series. The tragic accomplishment of Midnight Mass is that it’s as exciting as one.
My dear proficient professionals, never have I come across a story that was so boring, yet so intriguing. It was a bait and switch, and I fell for it like a rube in shock and awe of big city treachery. One of the reasons this series fails to land is its dialogue. Only two other cinematic crimes have rendered such intense malaise: Winona Ryder’s lines in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the entirety of the 2019 version of Cats. These grisly examples can now call Midnight Mass a peer, but at least they are definable and visible. The first episode comes off as a dark and foreboding setting – and when I mean dark, I literally mean lack of light. Certain scenes, especially ones set outside, are completely lacking in adequate visibility. Certain action sequences are not as engaging as they should be, and that’s a dang shame considering Midnight Mass sports one of the more terrifying versions of a vampire in a while.
Dark and dangerous. Just my type. Photo from CNET.com
Among its many flaws, Midnight Mass further tarnishes itself by desecrating the world of Vampires, which is at the heart of its malformed plot. Without spoiling too much of what is already rancid, Father Paul left Crocket Island on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Old and reeling from dementia, the priest becomes separated from his group, spills into the Damascus Desert and finds refuge in an old tomb during a sandstorm where he is turned by an ancient vampire. Upon leaving the cave, Father Paul is young with a rejuvenated mind and the belief that that winged creature who had saved him was an angel of God. This leads Father Paul to bring the creature to the island in an old steam trunk which triggers a set of grisly scenes that involve a beach full of mutilated cats and nothing else. This realization is not brought to the audience until halfway through the series where, until this revelation, the entire story has centered around Riley Flynn as he struggles to return to normalcy after killing a young woman in a car crash. These interweaving themes of death, redemption, and rebirth are so ham-handed I could taste the mayo, and they are excruciatingly flat scenes.
At its heart, Midnight Mass, is a vampire drama with scenes of gore, not horror, but it fails to play to its strengths and instead muddles them. In the immortal words of the gang, “what are the rules?”. In this world, drinking vampire blood cures the sick and can make the disabled whole again, but won’t turn you into a vampire unless you are bitten, allowed to die, and then given vampire blood to drink – whereupon you are brought back from the brink of death as a vampire. Though there are plenty of characters that simply rise from the dead as vampires regardless of having been turned at death's door. It is an annoying inconsistency and one that presents itself with little nuance or even emotional weight. The entirety of Midnight Mass is shockingly uneventful and leaves anyone not suffering from a TBI with a lasting bout of unadulterated boredom. From its poorly lit visuals to one dimensional characters, Midnight Mass will leave the average viewer so comatose you might as well read them last rites. Netflix would be wise to bury this one deep along with any thoughts of its resurrection.
