Hi.
As Halloween approaches I’ve started watching horror movies and series to get in the spooky spirit. I decided to finally watch a show by the horror master Mike Flanagan that had been on my radar for quite a while. Netflix’s Midnight Mass.
The show tells the story of a priest who goes to an island and suddenly miracles start happening around town. I won’t go into any spoilers relating to the overall story, just of two of the incredibly well written side characters. Leeza and Joe, two of the residents of the town.
Leeza is a teenage girl who’s a paraplegic. When she was younger she was on a walk with her father when suddenly she was accidentally shot in the spine by Joe, who was randomly shooting his gun in the woods while drunk. One day while she was at church a miracle happens and she, to the surprise of all, could walk again as if the accident had never happened.
Up until that point in the show we had seen that Joe was known to be the town drunk. Most nights he would get into trouble and the sheriff had to keep him in a cell overnight. We realize that shooting the girl had had a deep impact on him and he ended up just wasting his life away living in a trailer and getting drunk with his only friend, his dog.
Halfway through the season something happens. Something that I wasn’t expecting to see at all. Something that made me have to pause and just stare at my screen in awe with tears in my eyes.
Leeza shows up at Joe’s trailer. To his surprise, and very much my own, she enters the trailer and talks to him. She explains how she has felt all these years and that what she had pictured in her head for him was exactly what he was doing to himself. Living in filth and misery brought on by what he had done.
As she’s laying her feelings bare to him all he can do is just stand in place, a broken shell of a man, trying to avoid her gaze and trying to keep himself together barely holding on to the tears and screams of guilt wanting to burst out of him with the force of all the things he took from her. Then she says something he wasn’t expecting. Something he didn’t think he deserved. Something he would have never given himself the right to have.
I forgive you. I forgive you, Joe Collie. I forgive you and I see you now. I see you, and I’m still angry with you. But it’s different, even now saying it, it’s different. Do you wanna know why it’s different? Because the only thing standing between you and a better life is you. The only thing standing in my way was hate. The only thing standing in your way is you.
If God can forgive you… and he says he can… All over the place he says it… then I can forgive you. And if I can forgive you Joe Collie, then anyone can.
She leaves after saying that and he breaks down completely even before she’s through the door. This scene was simply incredible. Robert Longstreet and Annarah Cymone give powerful performances, in a show filled with them, and bring the script to life in a way I doubt even the writers were expecting. This is how you make side characters matter and not just take up screentime. What a masterclass of a scene.
Thank you for reading.