One thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around, in terms of the show’s status as horror, is its willingness to tug on the heartstrings like a weepy primetime soap. I’m perfectly fine with, say, the lengthy pair of monologues in which Riley and Erin outline their different ideas about what happens after we die, with Riley celebrating his eventual dispersal into the ecosystem and thence to oblivion while Erin imagines an afterlife for her disappeared daughter (very firmly a daughter in her mind, though the doctor never ascertained the sex of the baby) in which she is surrounded by love and never alone. I have a harder time with it when it’s underlaid with syrupy music designed to make us feel a certain way about all of it. Think of how much more engaging, riveting even, it would have been had these monologues passed in silence, leaving the words to rise or fall on their own strength.

Other than that, the show’s biggest problem remains Bev Keane. I don’t know how else to put it: This character is dead weight. She’s pure self-righteousness, pure zealotry, pure petty cruelty, pure obnoxiousness—a brick wall where someone who really lives and breathes on the page and on the screen could have been placed. Did you have any doubt in your mind that she’d become more of an acolyte and defender of Father Paul/Msgr. John when she discovered he’d murdered someone? Did you have any doubt she’d cow relatively soft figures like the handyman and the mayor into obedience, as if they were mere schoolchildren? It’s such a boring dynamic! Every second with her is wasted.

I reviewed episode four of Midnight Mass for Decider.

There’s something extraordinary about the third episode of Midnight Mass—and no, I don’t mean the ending. It’s the performance of Hamish Linklater as “Father Paul Hill,” the…villain of the piece? Or the hero? Or just some poor deluded sap who’s about as wrong as wrong can be about the horror he’s unearthed?

Anyway, long before we see what happened to his “predecessor” Monsignor John Pruitt in a buried desert ruin half a world away, we see a lot of sides of Father Paul. We see a priest asking God for forgiveness for the lies he’s about to tell his congregation. We see a man struggling to deal with a secret illness. We see a preacher delivering the kind of homily that sends you away from Mass thinking “Wow, he was really onto something,” at least until he collapses from exhaustion.

We see the leader of an AA meeting, calling bullshit on Riley Flynn’s recalcitrance around the group’s new third member Joe Collie, disarming the atheistic cynic with his warm but unyielding voice.

In short, we see, ironically as it turns out, just about the most realistic portrayal of a priest I’ve ever seen on TV. Linklater absolutely nails it: the soft vocal cadence, the paradoxically ostentatious humility, the ability to weave God in and out of conversation with members of the congregation, the dark secret locked away.

I reviewed episode three of Midnight Mass for Decider.

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.

“Whatever walked there, walked together.” With that sentence, writer-director-horror impresario Mike Flanagan converted The Haunting of Hill House, author Shirley Jackson’s scabrously bleak meditation on the fundamental isolation of being human, into some sort of hymn to the power of family. As an admirer of the original novel, I must confess this is where I tapped out of Flanagan’s work altogether. I just couldn’t forgive so deliberate a missing-of-the-point, no matter how much praise Ouija: Origin of Evil may have received.

So his latest Netflix project, Midnight Mass, is a bit of a hard sell, even if some of its elements—isolated island, charismatic and possibly evil priest, cat-eating vampires—are right up my alley. Can it transcend its creator’s tendency toward treacly sentimentality and let the scares do the talking?

I’m covering Mike Flanagan’s new show Midnight Mass for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.