05 Oct 2021 2 min read

Movie Review: Midnight Mass (2021)

Moral: Be careful whom you allow to get between yourself and God.

People who need to control everything and always be involved terrify me. I know someone like Bev, and she is actually a church person.

I love the metaphor of “Crock Pot” Island; a crock pot is a device in which you add ingredients and allow to simmer over time. You wait for your result, with patience, and let it work.

I also love the usage of St. Patrick, for he drove the snakes (so sayeth the myth) out of Ireland, which is an island. Snakes are a metaphor for people who are not what they seem, also for demons. And then…

Proverbs 23: 31-33:
Do not gaze at wine while it is red, when it sparkles in the cup and goes down smoothly. In the end it bites like a snake and stings like a viper. Your eyes will see strange things, and your mind will utter perversities.…

I am so impressed with the Biblical scholarship that went into this production.

As someone with CPTSD, I applaud the depiction of PTSD in Midnight Mass. Outstanding.

The Neil Diamond album played by Riley’s dad is his 12 Greatest Hits (Spotify, Apple Music); it played all the time in our car when I was a kid, on 8-track. Yep, we had an 8-track player in our car. It, as they say, slaps. I had forgotten how much religion is in his music, which is silly of me, because this is the man who remade The Jazz Singer as an exploration of a Jewish youth coming of age and straddling the two worlds of the secular music industry and his faith.

The soundtrack is fabulous. I knew most of the hymns, background and actively sung, from being an Episcopalian, growing up in a church as small as St. Patrick’s, and from listening to my great-grandmother and great-grandfather sing as they puttered in the house and the garden. Note: you always know the Episcopalian because we are the only ones to know the fifth and sixth verses of the hymns and Christmas carols.