Take and drink from it all. This is the cup of the new and eternal covenant, my blood, which is shed for you and for all for the forgiveness of sins. ”Wait, doesn’t that sound a little like vampirism?
At least for non-Christians: inside the Catholic Eucharist and the Evangelical Lord’s Supper are astonishingly bloody affairs. The wine that Jesus offered his disciples should symbolize his blood, the bread his “body”. They all become undead anyway, this is ensured by the resurrection. If a horror writer took Jesus’ words literally, he would have an excellent foundation for a genre series.
Mike Flanagan, whose adaptation of Spuk in Hill House Was a Netflix hit in 2018 is such a writer. That one Midnight MassThat a “midnight mass” does not take place during the day could also be related to the sun problem of one of the participants. So to Father Paul Hill (Hamish Linkater), who in Midnight Mass enters the remote Crockett Island as a replacement for the old “Monsignor”, because the latter passionately fulfilled his pastoral duties for the 128 members of the Catholic island community, but became increasingly shaky due to age and dementia. The young man of God is first noticed by his pleasant baritone and the safe conduct of the mass, the islanders: inside, a tight-knit community with fixed functions (the bad-tempered drunkard, the hard-working mayor, the diligent deaconess) are enthusiastic.
Word of Father Hill’s charisma gets around, the church, which until now was only heavily frequented on high holidays, is filling up. When Hill asks the paralyzed girl Leeza (Annarah Cymone) at a church service to collect the “Body of God” from the upper church level, the girl suddenly gets up and can walk again. And the Bible already knew: Nothing does a faith as good as a chic miracle.
That Hill’s alleged abilities have as little to do with the grace of God as the Beelzebub does with a novice is announced early on, albeit tentatively: Flanagan takes time to build up his tension, tells his story, carried by church choirs, in a chapter-like manner in a limited setting like biblical parables and carefully knits his carousel around it. There is the former start-up entrepreneur Riley (Zach Gilford), who returns to the island after a stay in prison and cannot forget his guilt – he killed a woman while drunk – just as his father Ed (Henry Thomas, who lives in ET Elliott played). Riley’s childhood friend Erin (Kate Siegel) also lives on Crockett again after disappointments, her pregnancy being looked after by the local doctor Sarah (Annabeth Gish). And Sheriff Hassan (Rahul Kohli) and his son are looked at as Muslims by the disrespectful deacon Bev (Samantha Sloyan).
In his story, Flanagan relies on the one hand on the familiarity of the community, in which everyone knows who comes and goes with which ferry: the island is like a control room surrounded by the sea, in which everyone observes the other. On the other hand, the director deliberately exposes the genre expectations by breaking the sparingly but effectively used horror convention (suspense music, eerie hints like shining eyes in the dark or a winged something that rushes across the plain at night, selected jumpcuts) and concentrating on dialogues: Erin and Riley have a philosophical, clearly atheistic conversation about the afterlife, the sheriff tells impressively of his experiences as a Muslim police officer after 9/11, and deaconess Bev interprets every fly shit with a lot of transfer as a sign of God.
At some point, however, and expected with increasing impatience, “earthly bodies must die so that the heavenly body awakens,” as Bev puts it. It goes without saying that the whole thing is bloody. That it has nothing to do with God, too. Midnight Mass is a wonderfully godless, excellently filmed work that exposes religious ideas for what they are: Understandable auxiliary constructions in order to be allowed to remain in a bubble of their own. And that applies to worshipers of God as well as to devil worshipers: inside.
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