Mike Flanagan has proven he’s a master at horror that’s greater than just jump-scares along with his Netflix series “The Haunting of Hill House,” “Bly Manor,” “Midnight Mass” and now “The Midnight Club.”
Based on novels by YA horror creator Christopher Pike (also an executive producer), “The Midnight Club” is about in Nineteen Nineties California and follows college-bound students.
Ilonka (Iman Benson) is a star student who gets a terminal-cancer diagnosis right when it appears like her whole life is ahead of her. After finding Brightcliffe online, she gets her foster dad Tim — Matt Biedel, who looks like he gets the decision when David Harbour is busy — to comply with take her to the mysterious hospice for a “trial run,” like “cancer sleepaway camp,” she says. It’s run by Mark (Zach Gilford) and Dr. Stanton (Heather Langekamp, “The Nightmare on Elm Street”) and is full of other sick young patients who gather around the hearth late at night to share wine and exchange scary stories — while pondering their very own frightening proximity to the grim reaper. (The hospice is, naturally, a rambling old Victorian mansion, naturally).
Ilonka is surrounded by colourful characters, but none of them are defined by their diseases. For example, there’s Kevin (Igby Rigney), who tells a story a couple of serial killer; Anya (Ruth Codd), Ilonka’s prickly roommate; and Amesh (Sauriyan Sapkota), who wishes the hospice had “hazing” like a school fraternity.
Brightcliffe has a sordid past and it’s stuffed with its own enigmatic goings-on: it’s commonplace for ghostly figures to be glimpsed within the halls, and there’s a cult that believes it resides on an ancient healing site.
The ten-episode series alternates between Ilonka exploring these mysteries and making discoveries concerning the hospice, and her friends’ tall tales playing out onscreen as stories throughout the larger story. This enables “The Midnight Club” some fun opportunities to get playful — with actors playing multiple roles as characters inside these stories — and to make stylistic departures, comparable to a black-and-white sequence.
Flanagan’s other shows have a heavy concentrate on characters’ emotions and traumas, in addition to a particular sense of place (often in a distant insular location), and “The Midnight Club” is not any different. What distinguishes it nevertheless, is its unabashed concentrate on teens unlike his other series centered totally on adults or families.
Some viewers might balk at this, since there are only a number of adults within the show, but recent younger fans might find that this series has crossover appeal to “Stranger Things.”
But “The Midnight Club” isn’t just Flanagan’s foray into the “terminally sick teen” subgenre (made popular by maudlin works comparable to “The Fault in Our Stars”). It’s darker and stranger, with much more material on which to chew than merely saying to the audience, “Isn’t this sad?”
Ilonka refuses to simply accept her fate; she’s really at Brightcliffe in pursuit of a miracle cure that she has reason to imagine might reside inside its partitions (since she chanced on an article a couple of past resident making a miraculous recovery). Unnecessary to say, this search leads her down a winding route.
“The Midnight Club” gets shaggy and rambling in parts, and episodes vary in quality. But for many who are searching for horror with heart, and a Halloween season viewing with more on its mind than blood and gore, it’s well price a watch.
