Midnight Mass

Midnight Mass is the best thing Mike Flanagan has made and it is a seven-hour argument about whether faith is a consolation or a weapon, conducted mostly by people sitting in rooms talking.

Crockett Island is thirty miles offshore, has a population in the hundreds, one church, one shop, one doctor, and a fishing fleet destroyed by an oil spill nobody was held responsible for. Flanagan builds it with unusual patience: the ferry timetable, the AA meetings in the rec centre, the feral cats, the mainland teenagers who left and did not come back. Riley Flynn returns after four years in prison for killing a girl while driving drunk; Erin Greene returns pregnant and will not say by whom; Sheriff Hassan is the island's only Muslim and has been there long enough to know he will never be from there.

Then Monsignor Pruitt comes back from the Holy Land as a man in his thirties calling himself Father Paul Hill, and the next five hours are a community being given everything it wants.

It is a vampire story and it refuses to say so

The creature in the trunk is never named. It has wings, it is centuries old, it drinks, its blood restores youth and reverses injury, and it is presented to the congregation as an angel — which Father Paul believes absolutely and sincerely, and which is why the series is not a fraud story. The horror is not that somebody is lying. It is that a decent, frightened man found something in a cave outside Damascus, interpreted it through the only framework he had, and was right about every observable fact and wrong about the only one that mattered.

The monologues are the form and they are extraordinary

Flanagan writes long. Riley and Erin on the boat, describing what each believes happens after death — his dissolution into nitrogen and water and the firing of neurons, hers a reunion and a self that persists — is fifteen minutes of two people talking and it is the best scene in the series by a distance. Bev Keane's defence of her own cruelty, Joe Collie's account of what one accident made of his life, Mildred Gunning's recognition of her daughter: the series lives or dies on whether you can watch people speak at length, and if you can it is unmatched.

Bev Keane is the villain and the creature is not

Samantha Sloyan's parish secretary is the most precisely written religious bully in screen horror: she quotes scripture accurately, she is unfailingly polite, she gives away other people's money, she poisons a congregation to save it, and she is never once shown to be insincere. The series' hardest idea is that Bev wants the same thing as everybody else on the island and is simply prepared to do more for it.

Where it is weak

It is slow to the point of self-indulgence in episodes two and three. The oil-spill backstory is underused. Hassan's son Ali is a device. And the series' commitment to its own eloquence occasionally produces speeches nobody would say.

For Flanagan's other long-form family haunting, The Haunting of Hill House; for the same closed community and the same faith turned lethal, The Wicker Man and The Witch; for the novel that wrote the rules this series breaks, Dracula.

The short answer: at the Easter Vigil, Bev Keane poisons the communion wine with rat poison so that the whole congregation will die and rise again, and the creature is released into the church. It works. Most of the island converts and spends the night killing the people who did not drink and burning the buildings they might hide in — which is the fatal error, because when dawn comes there is nowhere on Crockett Island to shelter. Erin stabs through the creature's wing and bleeds her own poisoned blood into it. Sarah Gunning and Hassan fight and die. Bev tries to bury herself in the sand on the beach and burns alive doing it. The converted, realising what they have done, gather on the shore and sing "Nearer, My God, to Thee" as the sun comes up and destroys them all. The creature flies off, wounded. The last two people alive are Leeza Scarborough — paralysed again, her miracle gone — and Warren Flynn, in a rowboat offshore, watching the island burn.

What is the angel in Midnight Mass?

A vampire, in every observable respect, that the series never once calls one. Monsignor Pruitt encountered it in a cave outside Damascus during a sandstorm on a pilgrimage; it attacked him and its blood restored his youth. It is winged, ancient, immensely strong, burns in sunlight and feeds on blood. Pruitt reads it as an angel of the Lord because the alternative is unthinkable to him, and the series lets his reading stand unchallenged in dialogue while showing you exactly what it is.

Who survives Midnight Mass?

Two people: Leeza Scarborough and Warren Flynn, who row away from the island in the dark. Leeza's miracle fails as the creature's blood leaves her and she loses the use of her legs again in the boat, which is the series' last and bleakest gesture. Everybody else on Crockett Island dies — the converted in the sunrise, the unconverted at the hands of their neighbours.

Is Father Paul the same person as Monsignor Pruitt?

Yes, and the series withholds it for three episodes while making it visible from the first. Pruitt was taken on pilgrimage at the end of his life, found the creature, drank, and returned physically in his thirties; he adopts the name Paul Hill — his own name before ordination — because nobody would accept the truth. He is also Sarah Gunning's father, by Mildred, which the series reveals as the reason he came back rather than staying away.

What does the ending of Midnight Mass mean?

That the island destroys itself with a sincerely held belief. Nobody is deceived into the Vigil: Father Paul tells the congregation exactly what the wine will do and they drink anyway, and Bev's poison only accelerates something they have already consented to. The converted then burn their own houses, which is both a literal and an exact metaphor — they have removed every place they could have survived in. Erin's final monologue, repeating the account of death she gave Riley on the boat and arriving somewhere different, is the series' answer: there is no self that persists, and that is not a horror.

Is Midnight Mass about addiction?

Substantially. Riley is four years sober and attends AA on the island; Joe Collie is the town drunk whom nobody will forgive; Father Paul's first act of pastoral care is running the meetings. The series maps the fourth and fifth steps directly onto confession, and the creature's blood is presented as the thing that takes away every pain at once and asks only that you keep taking it. Flanagan has been explicit that this is deliberate.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Tone 016 is bleak — 40 works score lower. An entire community kills itself and each other, and the two survivors include a girl whose healing has been taken back.

The threat at 055 is just above the midpoint, which is the correct reading: the creature is not human and not malicious, and every atrocity in the series is organised by a parish secretary with a Bible.

Viscera 050 is mid-scale — 57 works score lower. Throat wounds, a self-inflicted knife injury, mass poisoning, several burnings and a great deal of blood-drinking.

Era bias 090 reads modern — 96 works score lower. Digital capture, a contemporary setting, mobile phones that do not work, and a streaming-era seven-hour structure.

Pace 024 is very slow — 29 works are slower. Whole episodes are conversations, and the series' most famous scene is two people sitting on a boat.

Reality anchor 046 is just under the midpoint. One island, consistent rules, and only the final sunrise sequence approaches the surreal.

On jump scares: perhaps three in seven hours, and the series is not interested in them.