Absolutely loved Flanagan's other recent work, however Midnight Mass was a big miss overall.
After the first episode I was encouraging friends to see it. By the fourth episode I was politely withdrawing my recommendation and casually discouraging the same.
It started great. Intriguing little town, wonderful locations (not a soundstage or studio, but actual little village facade they built for the show).
Extraordinary acting from some of the cast. Linklater and Sloyan stand out for their incredible work. If the overall product were better they would be heralded for their utter brilliance and would be lining up for awards, but instead this will be quickly forgotten.
By the end I felt like I was watching just to get some sort of payoff for the time invested, throwing good time after bad.
The first miss is the terrible "young people playing old people" tactic, which literally never works outside of comedies where it is intentionally farcical. Immediately obvious to anyone with eyes and ears, you're deconstructing the plot to figure out how or why these people would be de-aged. Though over time you realize the plot is riddled with holes and nonsensical motivations regardless, so you don't want to think too much about it. The fact that not once does anyone on the island ask "So...vampires?" indicts the whole work. The "everyone suddenly is completely useless" ending was so extraordinarily sloppy it was the cherry on the top of this waste of time.
And the monologues...Flanagan seems to have become too much of a fan of his own product (and has been elevated to a degree that the people around him aren't being honest to him) because the monologues are just a crime against humanity. Boorish, insipid, philosophy-101 expositions, containing little intellectual or insightful merit, that go on and on and on. Couple them with absurd human interactions that border on parody (for example someone revealing they had a miscarriage, to which someone casually responds about a dream they had) and you start to wonder if the screenplay was authored by GPT-3. It truly feels like someone realized they only had 3 episodes worth of content so 4 episodes worth of dialogue filled out the space.
Some of the camera work betrays the same sort of self-absorbed arrogance, including the long single-shot beach scene that was awkward, jarring to immersion, and just served absolutely no value beyond someone saying "See! Look what I did! Aren't I great?"
The bizarrely unnecessary camera techniques and horrible "elder" makeup give you time to focus on the backing soundtrack, which I think was the result of some sort of dare or challenge: The entirety of the soundtrack consists of periodic chords in isolation, and could have been algorithmically accomplished to better result. It, like so much of the product, seems to the result of people who have literally no one around them telling them when their product is not good.
Ultimately I'm left wishing I'd never started the series at all. The whole thing just leaves a bad taste and sours Flanagan's legacy.
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