I have to admit I’ve been weary of Netflix for a while- strolling their menu in vain for anything to watch. There’s always a glut of choices but nothing that speaks to me, that’s for sure. And then, like magic, in the course of a couple of weeks three of the best series popped up. And each one is compulsive viewing.
Midnight Mass is another wonderful witches’ brew by director Mike Flanagan, who I’ve really come to love after his offbeat series like The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, not to mention his sensational adaptation of Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep. And Stephen King’s spirit hovers over Midnight Mass that’s for damn sure- a horrifying tale set on Crockett Island, an isolated island decimated because of an oil spill which ruined their fishing industry. A new priest (phenomenal Hamish Linklater) arrives to temporarily replace their elderly Monsignor Pruitt, who went on sabbatical to the Holy Land. Zach Gilford is heartbreaking as Riley, returning to the island (and his wary parents) after a lengthy prison sentence for a drunken driving incident that left a young woman dead. He is haunted by guilt. His old girlfriend Erin (Katy Siegel) has also reluctantly returned home to the island, unmarried and pregnant. Then there’s Bev (Samantha Sloyan) the zealous, judgmental right-hand to the priest. She is one of the best villains I’ve seen in a while, and everything done with a butter-wouldn’t-melt sanctimonious smile. Now I’m not going to spoil the dark surprises which are plentiful, but it does get nightmarishly apocalyptic. What’s so fascinating about the mini-series is all the verbose discussions about religion, guilt, addiction- it’s at first a bit off-putting but eventually it becomes more potent and affecting. In a later episode, a monologue by the Muslim Sherriff (Rahul Kohli) about post 9-11 just punches you in the gut. There something powerful and personal about the whole series. And then there’s the horror, which is often chilling and unexpected. The show just floored me, in a great way.
The Chestnut Man was a novel I devoured. The author is Soren Sveistrup, who had a hand in the Danish version of The Killing, and he also assisted in the screenplay of this relentlessly suspenseful series on Netflix based on his top-notch thriller. A series of brutal murders of negligent mothers confounds detectives, especially when at every scene of the crime is left a little chestnut man containing the fingerprints of the daughter of politician Rosa Hartung (Iben Dorner), assumed murdered. A female detective (Danica Curcic) is practically out the door of the police station, accepting a less stressful desk job. She is saddled with a brooding detective (Mikkel Boe Folsgaard) with a shady past who has been sent in to assist her and his unorthodox methods infuriate the other officers at the station. Each new killing ends up putting them all in peril. What’s incredibly affecting is the torment of Rosa Hartung, just back to work and desperately trying, with her husband, to move past the grief over the loss of their daughter, only to be offered a cruel sliver of hope that she might not be dead. Six spare, incredibly twisted, twisty episodes makes for pulse-pounding viewing- almost impossible not to binge.
Squid Game is a South Korean survivalist series about many desperate souls who are mysteriously selected and handed a little gold card with a phone number. They are enticed to play a game where they could possibly win a great deal of money, which for many would be the answer to their prayers. Then they are knocked out and whisked off to an unknown island to play a set of deadly games, only to find the elimination process frighteningly more final then they imagined. Riffing off movies like Takashi Miike’s As the Gods Will, Battle Royale and even The Hunger Games, this still manages to be incredibly potent, with sympathetic characters you come to care about, making their fate all the more upsetting. The art direction is staggering- some of the set pieces of the games are extraordinary. And there’s a subversive political underbelly to the whole thing, in much the way the award-winning film Parasite was. The fact that this series is a major hit is kind of wild and surprising in some ways, but I’m thrilled for the success. Amusingly the phone number on the card is a real one and the poor people at the end of that line have been barraged with phone calls from rabid fans of the show asking “to play the game.” That in itself is the most confounding thing of all after you’ve seen the entire series. Why in hell would you want to do that?
