The second episode of Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass begins with an uninterrupted, seven-minute-long shot of its cast of characters surrounded by dead cats. They walk, they talk, they investigate, they speculate, they come together and drift away, and all the while seagulls flock to the stretch of beach they inhabit, picking away at the hundreds of slaughtered stray cats that have washed ashore on Crockett Island. As long takes go, it’s not especially noteworthy—it’s not as eventful as, say, that endless shootout from season one of True Detective, and it’s not as still as the out-of-nowhere egg-cooking scene from last week’s episode of Billions. But you have to respect Flanagan for plopping us down amid a mountain of cat corpses and allowing us to linger there, long after most shows would have looked away.
I reviewed episode two of Midnight Mass for Decider.
Tags: decider, horror, midnight mass, reviews, TV, TV reviews