The Midnight Club

The Midnight Club is a surprisingly thoughtful rumination on what it means to die, although its deeper truths come wrapped in the bright candy coating of a teen drama.

The Midnight Club continues Mike Flanagan’s ability to creep and scare the pants off viewers while building stories with great characters. The varied tones of the club’s stories should bring an interesting wrinkle to Flanagan’s usual dark and tense style.

That, here, the grief and loss is for the characters’ own futures demands a delicacy that Flanagan and Fong possess; it also demands to be matched by a horror appropriately outsized and scary, and they deliver that, too.

The value in The Midnight Club lies not in its central mystery but rather with its eight members, whose personal stories (both imagined and experienced) are thought-provoking, emotionally charged and likely to stick with viewers for some time.

Not all of the stories contained in The Midnight Club work equally well, and a few purposely don’t really work at all. Collectively, however, they mount a compelling case for why stories matter and why scary stories in particular do, inelegant or imperfect though they may be — and along the way, draw some jolts, a few gasps and a great many tears.

A departure in some ways and classic Flanagan in others, The Midnight Club is another affecting entry into the prolific filmmaker’s array of stories that make us think differently about mortality and morality.

The show only has a period setting because that's when the book The Midnight Club came out, not because it's integral to the story. And the dialogue actively works to undermine the setting. ... But that's a relatively minor complaint on a show that does the big things right. Flanagan and his collaborators have once again delivered an emotionally potent horror drama, this time adding in a YA element to keep things fresh.

The Midnight Club isn’t particularly terrifying, but it’s satisfyingly creepy. More than that, it’s unusually intense for any show — especially one catering to YA audiences — about the topics of life and death.

It’s unlikely to be anyone’s favorite of the Flanagan projects. However, it could be a new horror fan’s first. And, perhaps more importantly, it could be something that really speaks to a young person who has been forced to deal with death in an unfair way, looking for a story to help them figure out how to write their own.

An engaging, if uneven, YA series that rests its premise on the palliative power of storytelling. ... Overall, though, and especially as an October Netflix offering for those famished for some Flanagan horror fare, The Midnight Club is a worthy binge-watch.

The Midnight Club smartly uses the trappings of horror, and other modes of genre fiction, to explore the power of storytelling as a means of reckoning with the unfathomable.

As the show flies by, the nightly scare stories work more effectively than the lumbering haunted house stuff, and of course all of this is housed in a Young Adult world that may be a bit gory but is essentially wholesome.

Occasional missteps aside, Flanagan’s reverence for the literature from which his work derives keeps this Pike tribute intriguing throughout. The performances are uniformly excellent. ... No amount of screen presence can detract from the narrative being an overstuffed mess in need of a purge. ... While The Midnight Club isn’t lazy, simply acknowledging a reliance on well-worn tropes isn’t the same as subverting them.

It’s easy to imagine some viewers taking to how much time it gives to the whimsy of these characters, and without the series abusing the heartstrings usually laid bare when presenting warming, curious fictional beings who are terminally ill. But as it unfolds so erratically, the series leaves more to be desired, despite giving so much—at the least, it needs some special organization.

The darkness in “The Midnight Club” encroaches reluctantly, as if it were crashing a party. Optimism and fear can make for strange bedfellows, and “The Midnight Club “ feels caught in between these two poles, not quite sure what tone to take.

“The Midnight Club” feels so focused on overthrowing conventions that Flanagan neglected to center the series around a story as clear and commanding as its message.

It’s creepy, to a point, but moves at a crawl, while focusing on the provocative if unappealing premise of eight kids with terminal illnesses.

Flanagan leans so heavily on gooey and preachy melodrama—while going unreasonably light on scares or resolutions to his central mysteries—that his latest streaming series proves a collection of tired platitudes dressed up in faux-horror garb.

Bland and unfocused. ... Lovable as they are, and despite solid performances from the young cast, these characters are mostly one-dimensional. ... This premise could have played to his strengths, if only he hadn’t been too distracted by gimmicky plot elements to refine his story lines and too reverent of his ailing characters to plumb their darkest depths.