In the Flesh: Black Mass

The last time I reviewed Mike Flanagan’s work, I panned it. His The Haunting of Hill House-inspired adaptation of the same name was saccharine sludge, full of overwrought monologues and wooden performances, everything lit in a flatly ghastly greenish-gray like some kind of purgatorial office park interior, every set coldly impersonal. The bulk of the show’s CGI was lazy and slipshod, and in approaching the design, costuming, and makeup of its specters it showed a spectacular lack of imagination. Many of these faults are still present in his seven-part miniseries Midnight Mass, but even where the show staggers under the weight of the director’s least-interesting impulses, it has a biting central thesis and distinct sense of place — not to mention one of the most jaw-dropping lead performances of the past few years — to anchor it in a way Hill House never felt anchored.

As the soft-spoken but passionate father Paul Hill, Hamish Linklater embodies the essence of the modern Catholic priest. He is curious but unshakeable, amiable but intense, a study in carefully-drawn and considered contradictions at once blindingly earnest and fully calculated. His upright posture and gentle but rapid and definite elocution give him a sexlessly fatherly air, a virginal sense of strength and calm reliability. And beneath all of this bubbles the subtle fanaticism of the true believer, the willingness to take and twist whatever horrors present themselves into part of some divine plan, metaphysical scaffolding to support the bloated parasitic monstrosity of the church he serves, as well as the actions of its sublimated embodiment in the person of the vampiric entity known only as “the angel” (Quinton Boisclair). It’s Linklater who unites the show’s disparate strengths — its gorgeous run-down island setting, its Neil Diamond-driven soundtrack, its painfully intense lapsed Catholic sensibility — into something realer, more heartfelt than the sum of its parts.

Like most of Flanagan’s work, the series doesn’t boast much in the way of scares. Its few bravura sequences of violence are more driven by despair and revulsion than by fear. Before it reveals the appearance of its vampiric antagonist, though, the creature is a remarkably frightening presence in the shadows. A sequence in which a young man sees only its gleaming eyes and a single clawed hand as it prowls like a big cat at the edge of a shaft of moonlight is as rippling with menace as any shot of the shark’s fin cutting water in Jaws. That Flanagan lacks the restraint to leave the creature where it actually inspires fear — in the shadows — is a predictable fault, and while there are a few interesting moments after its reveal, its aura of terror largely falls away. Still, it’s the people who matter in Flanagan’s ultimately humanist vision of faith and hysteria, and between Robert Longstreet’s astonishingly powerful turn as town drunk Joe Collie and Samantha Sloyan’s vicious performance as the uptight and fanatical town spinster Bev Keane, the series has more than enough dramatic power to go the distance.

Of course it wouldn't be a Flanagan joint without an overwrought and largely ineffective piece of closing narration about the beauty of life and mortality. Kate Siegel just can't hack the corny material; her performance is serviceable, but it lacks depth, and while her first go-round at describing her view of life after death, dripping with sugar as it is, is surprisingly wrenching, her second run at it lacks that personal punch. Along with the series' other generically good-looking protagonist, Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford), she feels like an afterthought in the shadow of Linklater's work. Still, the quieter, less talky hymn and reflective moment of loss and acceptance with which the series actually ends are strong enough to cover for the lack, Flanagan's sentimentality for once bearing fruit in a touching sequence of community and love in the face of devastation.