Review of ‘Midnight Club’: neither trick nor treat

Yet another version of Mike Flanagan, who must have thought that if what he does works out for him, why would he change. You put a mansion, some shadow effects (fundamental!), actors and actresses who know how to put on a face of overwhelm -not fright-…. and chimpún, you already have another series of ten well-packaged chapters to do marathon. This time it is called ‘Midnight Club’, and the main change from the previous ones is that the protagonists are teenagers. And that we already know by hand that they are going to die. This is not a spoiler, it is the plot.

Part by part. What he does not propose on this occasion is to bring together seven terminal patients (young people) in a large house where they live the last days or weeks of their lives. These, on their own, get together at night and set up a club, which gives the series its name. To be part of it you need two things: committing to send messages from the other side once deceased and telling scary stories. Each chapter, and not to reveal much of the plot, has one of those stories as its main axis. Fear? None.

Warning: if this is the plan you have in mind to spend a night of terror, or to execute that stupid idealized fantasy of cuddling with a Tinder date pretending to be scared, this is not the series you are looking for. Really none of Flanagan. This author is one of those who say that it is based more on the psychological. bullshit Translated: a great rollazo of 10 hours of duration.

Terminal disease

Do not deduce from what has been written so far that it is a bad series. It is not. So is it good? The most appropriate thing would be to answer something as ambiguous as “no more”. You won’t feel like you’ve wasted your time, but it’s likely that in a month you won’t even remember it. It is light years away from ‘The curse of Hill House’, which did provide a different story with a plot that was sustained in several episodes. In favor of the ‘Midnight Club’ plays that part of the script in which they speak, without cutting a hair, of terminal illnesses, of death, about how they face it and the farewell of their friends in these last days of life. “Every day of life here is a victory,” says one of the protagonists. The series introduces with some success that debate on palliative care policy and how to face a dignified death. But this is at the same time one of the drawbacks, that it is a secondary discourse since the important thing, or what is promoted, or what is intended, is that other part, that of the scary stories, that of the shadow effects and elevators to spooky basements.

What keeps the entire narrative going is the character of Ilonka (Iman Benson) who is a young aspiring writer who investigates the past of Brightcliffe hospice, where this center for terminal patients is located. She researches past patients, they have visions in which she connects with them…. and the ghosts of her. This is where Mike Flanagan displays all his abilities to generate tension, with closed and claustrophobic shots.

In short, put on ‘Midnight Club’ if you have no more pretensions than to also check this Mike Flanagan series. You won’t be disappointed – maybe some of the sub-stories will – because the whole is compact but not flowery enough for us to highly recommend it. And less if for that reason of celebrating the nights of the living dead this pretends to be your bet.