“Love doesn’t die, people do.” It is really at the beating heart of Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong’s ten-episode adaptation of the work of Christopher Pike in that it is not just about trying to understand the end of life but using poetry and prose to do so. Ilonka quotes that Merrit Malloy passage in Netflix’s “The Midnight Club,” and it is really at the beating heart of Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong’s adaptation of the work of Christopher Pike.
This is a presentation that is not so much about death as it is about the things that occur near the end of life and what cannot be taken away from a person, such as their memories, their experiences, and their love. Its messaging can be a little awkward at times, but considering that this is a programme about young people that is also primarily aimed at a young adult audience, we can overlook this flaw (despite some wickedly intense imagery and the occasional f-bomb).
It’s expected of teenagers to be rough around the edges, unsure of themselves, and unprotected. I was more aware of the swirl of adolescent emotion that develops around subjects as severe as mortality each time “The Midnight Club” felt a little rough around the edges, rather than being outraged about any aesthetic faults that may have occurred.
Fans who are expecting something as impressive as “Midnight Mass” or “The Haunting of Hill House” may be a little surprised by the ways in which this programme drags in comparison or simply mistakes some of the more significant emotional sequences. You may think of this as a gateway drug for young people thinking about death in a fresh way for the first time, which could be the first time they’ve ever thought about death.
A terminal cancer diagnosis throws everything that Ilonka (an effectively vulnerable Iman Benson) has into disarray, despite the fact that she appears to have everything. She finds herself in a place that is essentially a stand-in for Hill House called Brightcliffe. It is a historic house that is currently being used as a hospice centre for young people.
There, she meets an offbeat group of young people who are the inspiration for the show’s name. They get together at the library every night and share terrifying tales in an effort to make sense of what is going to happen to them via the lens of their fiction. Ilonka, meanwhile, unearths evidence that suggests the hospice and its enigmatic manager (Heather Langenkamp, best known for her role in “A Nightmare on Elm Street”) are keeping a secret from her that has the potential to save her life.
As a result, the content of each episode switches back and forth between Ilonka’s explorations of the centre and a narrative narrated by one of her companions. The show eventually centres on the manner in which and the motivation behind the telling of stories as a means of processing the world as it is. And the exact ways in which these tales reveal more about the individual who is relating them than anything else does.
Because each season of The Midnight Club consists of ten episodes and is therefore excessively long, we are able to become familiar with all of the show’s eight main characters to varying degrees. Kevin (Igby Rigney), a potential love interest who tells a multi-episode story about a serial killer that gives the show some of its most striking imagery, and Anya (Ruth Codd), Ilonka’s bitter but fierce roommate, are two of the standout characters on the show.
One of the stories appears to have been inspired by Road to Nowhere, while Kevin’s arc appears to have been taken from another work by Pike named The Wicked Heart.
Although it might be a good idea to incorporate stories from other Pike works into this one, there were times when I longed for narratives that flowed more naturally, as though they had been drawn from the experiences of key characters such as Kevin and Anya. The narrative about Kevin is told very effectively, but it is clear that it is not actually about Kevin; rather, the writer or inventor is trying to be clever.