The Philosophy of Midnight Mass: A Christian Perspective

This review contains major spoilers.

I started watching Midnight Mass the day it premiered on Netflix, just a few hours after the series became available. I’d been anticipating it since the first trailer arrived, and even with all those months of waiting, the final product didn’t disappoint. On the surface, it seems to be a Stephen King-esque horror story about vampires taking over a small island; but somewhere far below, it turns into a meditation on faith, pain, and everything in between. We may not know much by the time we finish this series, but we are convinced of one thing: everyone has to believe in something. Having faith in something bigger than ourselves is the only way to endure life on this planet.

Despite the show not being Christian by any stretch of the imagination, it shows the benefits of those beliefs and portrays their true followers in a (mostly) beneficial light. Father Paul, for example, is the beating heart of the show in many ways, and his portrayal is positive despite his obvious faults. His AA meetings with Riley are some of my favorite scenes in the show, mostly because both sides are shown equally fairly. Riley, a recent atheist with some problematic feelings toward organized religion, makes valid points. His questions are understandable, even if he’s at times unnecessarily harsh towards Christians as a whole. Father Paul responds to his questions thoughtfully, with care, and when he comes across one he’s not sure he can answer, he says so. He doesn’t use empty platitudes or give meaningless words of comfort. He doesn’t suggest he has all the answers or wisdom Riley is looking for. What he does have, however, is faith. When Riley asks him a particularly difficult question, Father Paul has little to say except that it’s a matter of simple trust – of choosing to believe something, even when it doesn’t make sense. That simple proclamation isn’t quite enough for Riley, and he says that he wants more explanation than that. “And I’ll always wish that I could give you more,” the priest tells him. “But that’s all I’ve got.”

The character of Riley himself is a particularly interesting one. It’s said more than once in the show that he was a devout Catholic in his younger days, but since his accident at the start of the show, he’s abandoned his beliefs entirely. In many ways, he represents the cynic in all of us – the piece of our hearts that wonders, maybe only in the hardest of times or maybe on a regular basis, if what we’ve believed all our lives is really true. After the unintentional yet seemingly unforgivable crime that he committed, he’s decided the answer to that question is no. There seems to be a part of him that wants to believe – that sees the unexplainable peace salvation has given to the ones he loves – but he can’t bring himself to it. He can’t equate a loving God with the horrible events that happen in the world. He can’t fathom the existence of a God who could forgive all his wrongdoings.

Where Riley’s story gets particularly interesting is the moment he’s attacked by the blood-sucking creature and turned into a vampire. There’s a facet to this part of the plot that I didn’t notice until my second viewing, but once I saw it, it was impossible to ignore. When Riley discovers what Father Paul has been doing all this time, he’s understandably disappointed, to say the least. He comes to some level of realization as to what the priest’s plan is for Crockett Island – whether he understands all the details, or just knows something generically bad is coming, I’m not certain – and wants to get his loved ones off the island before the vampires overrun it. That’s when he takes Erin out onto the boat and, knowing she won’t believe his story unless she sees it for herself, allows himself to be obliterated by the rising sun.

On my first viewing, while I found his final scene to be emotional, it seemed almost out of character. I never found Riley to be a bad guy, necessarily, and I always got the idea that there was more to him than what was seen on the surface. But this willingness to immediately sacrifice himself seemed so uncharacteristically selfless that I almost wrote it off as a minor plot hole. Until my second viewing, when I noticed something I hadn’t before. During Father Paul’s earlier explanation of this vampirism, he clarified that the vampiric creature restores one to their “best sense of self”. In other words, it takes them back to the time when they were at their best, physically and mentally. Hence the reason that both Mildred and the priest were restored to their younger selves, and Leeza became able to walk, and Riley’s parents were healed of their back pain and bad eyesight. Since Riley was already fairly young and healthy when he ingested the vampire’s blood, it seems that his reversion was connected to his mental, spiritual state, as opposed to his physical health. Viewing it in this light, it suddenly became clear to me that maybe it was this restoration to his younger self – the version of Riley that believed, that had faith and hope and purpose – that caused him to make his sacrifice.

It’s hard to know for certain what was intended by some of these plot points, particularly Riley’s entire character arc, because the show raises quite a few questions it never seeks to answer. Important inquiries are relentlessly raised, but we get few, if any, solutions to them – and to be honest, that’s part of what I think makes the show as effective as it is. In one of Riley’s meetings with Father Paul, the two of them talk about suffering and the fact that God’s will, at times, remains largely unknown. Father Paul encourages him to give himself over to God, explaining that it’s okay to not always presume to know the reason behind our pain. “Sometimes it’s okay to just look at the world and say, ‘why? I don’t understand’”, he says, and Riley admits that this statement is the first one the priest has made that he’s fully agreed with.

That being said, for all the ways Midnight Mass gets things right, there are at least a few areas that are a little less clear. I wouldn’t argue against anyone who says that the show seems to have it out for Catholicism, because there are enough jabs present for that to be an understandable viewpoint. While I’m not entirely sure what the wrap-up of Father Paul’s story is supposed to mean, it seems to portray that, at least in a way, he regrets his life in the priesthood. When he talks to Mildred about the romance they shared in their younger years, he expresses the loneliness he’s felt because he had to let her and their daughter Sarah go. “Our whole lives have been wasted just staring across the church,” he says, “too scared to come down and be with you. Too scared to tell our own daughter the truth.” He goes on to confess, “If you had just shown up and asked me, I would have taken this collar off and I would have gone with you anywhere in the world.” And when he finally removes the collar and throws it into the water, asking for Mildred’s forgiveness, it’s his final show of recognition, of respect for the life that he could have had. It’s one of the most emotionally charged moments in the show, but the underlying implication is that religion – at least the way he approached it – ruined his life, and he could have been a happier, less regretful person had he chosen a path outside the priesthood.

The simplest thing you can say about this show’s philosophy is that, all things considered, it’s universalist by nature. As the island’s vampiric inhabitants wait for the sunrise that will destroy them all, they’ve all found peace in their own ways, whether it’s the Catholics singing a hymn or the Muslims praying in Arabic. The only person who seems to have no peace at all is Bev Keane, the one character whose faith seemed fake from the start. (As someone who’s been in church for as long as I can remember, I can say that I’ve absolutely met some real Bev Keanes in my life.) The haughtiness and self-righteousness that she carried with her like a shield for most of the show is long gone in her final moments. Instead of praying or singing to the God she claimed to know so well, she spends her final moments desperately digging a hole in the sand, trying to shield herself from the upcoming sunlight. It’s a terribly painful scene to watch, despite how much I hated her character.

I couldn’t finish this article without mentioning the one thing I would change about the show if given the chance. It would have to be the use of a single statement, one that’s made at two different points in the series, and it sticks in my throat a little each time I try to repeat it. Without giving an overload of context, each use of the line follows one of Erin Greene’s monologues about her beliefs and what she thinks happens when we die. She finishes each of her speeches by asserting: “That is what we mean when we say God.” Whatever she’s spoken in the last few minutes of dialogue is her definition of God; and on its own, that isn’t an inherently bad thing. I suppose it’s the verbiage of “we” that throws me off a bit. For a series that blatantly encourages us to believe whatever we want to believe, that we can all have God now matter what religion we identify with, the repeated use of this line felt like it was giving us the answer to the question of who God is. And the story is much more affecting when it doesn’t seek to give us those responses. (On a side note, Erin’s death scene holds the most blasphemous phrase used in the show. As she describes her universalist view on the infinity of herself, she declares, “I am that I am”. It didn’t quite hit me the first time I heard this line that she was referencing the phrase Jesus used to describe Himself, but once I realized what they were getting at, it became one of the most troublesome moments in the series.)

Despite its obvious faults, it’s one of the most effective and personal series I’ve seen in quite awhile. In the day of blockbuster franchises and popcorn flicks, it’s refreshing to see something that makes you think as much as Midnight Mass does. It asks questions that many of us prefer not to think about, and forces us to look them straight in the eye. We’re not left with any clear-cut answers to questions like why we suffer, why bad things happen to good people, and how God can forgive us for the things we do. What we are left with are the words spoken by Father Paul earlier in the series: “God can take our works, even our awful works, and turn them into something else. I know He can find the good in them, find the love in them, whether we see it or not. That I know.” And, despite the show’s obvious shortcomings, that’s not a bad message to walk away with.