Midnight Mass Review

Flanagan carried this story for years before Netflix made it, even planting its title as a prop novel in Hush and Gerald's Game, and it has the density of a private obsession. Riley Flynn comes home to Crockett Island after four years in prison for killing a teenage girl while driving drunk, in the week that Father Paul arrives to stand in for the parish's ageing monsignor. The episodes are named for books of the Bible, Genesis to Revelation, and the shape follows the titles.

Hamish Linklater is the reason to watch. His Father Paul speaks as if he is discovering each sentence as he goes, gentle and hungry at once. Samantha Sloyan's Bev Keane, a parishioner who hears scripture as permission, is the most frightening person in it, and Rahul Kohli's Muslim sheriff gets the most restrained speech in a series full of them.

The monologues are also the problem. Characters deliver long addresses on death, sobriety and God, some of them the best writing Flanagan has done and some plain sermons, and the middle episodes lose momentum waiting for a reveal most viewers will have guessed. When the horror arrives, the effects are weaker than the dread before them. It remains a serious, moving, overlong series about what faith does to frightened people.