😍 2022-10-07 19:01:53 – Paris/France.
The Midnight Club, one of the Netflix releases of the month – Credits: @Netflix
the midnight club (The Midnight Club, United States, 2022). Creators: Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong, based on the novel by Christopher Pike. Cast: Iman Benson, Adia, Igby Rigney, Ruth Codd, William Chris Sumpter, Aya Furukawa, Zach Gilford, Annarah Cymone, Sauriyan Sapkota, Heather Langenkamp. Available on: Netflix. Our opinion: good.
In their teens, director, screenwriter and showrunner mike flangan read the novel Christopher Pike the midnight club and immediately established a very deep connection with one of the many works young adult of the prolific writer. "I thought I was going to read something pulp of death but it wasn't like that, it was teenagers trying to live with the illnesses they had, and it completely surprised me," said the director, one of the news and most seductive voices of contemporary terror.
After premieres for netflix from the miniseries The Curse of Hill House (2018) The Curse of Bly Manor (2020) et Midnight Mass (2021), Flanagan, supported by Leah Fong, finally adapted Pike's novel after trying it years ago in feature film format, a project that never came to fruition. In this case, the midnight club is his first series for the platform, with a first season which, faithful to the style of its co-creator, is long (it consists of 10 one-hour episodes) and has a cadence reminiscent of that of The Curse of Bly Manor as to the climax to which he comes in the last chapters, and that of Midnight Mass in connection with the long monologues of its characters with their diatribes on time and duels.
Mike Flanagan conceives for the first time a series on teenagers for Netflix – Credits: @Netflix
As director of sleep doctor, Pike's work didn't exactly seek dramatic effects: it chronicled the progression of a friendship between seven people who were soon to die disguised as a terrifying story. In keeping with the source material, Flanagan and Fong build their story without neglecting this starting point and, even with ups and downs along the way, they deliver sad but not distressing fiction, a feat considering its premises.
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the midnight club takes place almost exclusively in the Hospice Rotterdam, an old and imposing restored house (one of those Flanagan uses to display his directorial virtuosity) where young people diagnosed with terminal illnesses will die there “on their own terms”. At this point, the series shows these teenagers denying the way they're treated in a world where those around them tend to fall into set phrases that constantly remind them that their days are numbered. Por lo tanto, cuando la protagonista de la historia, Ilonka (Iman Benson), ve cómo se frustra su sueño de estudiar en Stanford y no puede convivir con la mirada vidriosa de su padre adoptivo, decide tomar el control de su propia narrativa e internarse in this place.
The Midnight Club – Credits: @Netflix
However, there is something else that motivates Ilonka, a born, vehement and reckless leader, to enter this unknown zone: the news that in the 60s, a young woman who remained in Rotterdam obtained the cure for her illness. Although Flanagan and his editorial team are very careful about how to deal with such a delicate subject as the impact of terminal diagnoses on young patients, they are not evasive about it either. For this they do not need to show the progressive physical deterioration of their protagonists (The Midnight Club is a series about perseverance, presence and community building) but they choose to carefully draw the personalities of these seven teenagers who live under the same roof and promise, in the event of death, to communicate from the afterlife . Supernatural edges are present in the series and Flanagan does not spare the sudden appearance of chilling characters in the corridors of this hospice, but his interest lies elsewhere, in what shook him when he read Pike's novel.
Thus, each episode of the midnight club it has intervals in which these young people recount, on the nights they find themselves at the library, horror stories (and with metatextual winks) that they have conceived with parallels to their own lives. This is how Ilonka invents an avatar, Imani, a seer who seeks to protect her friends from impending tragedies; and how spencer (William Chris Sumpter, the revelation of a series that relies on a cast of unknown actors), who suffers from HIV, tells a story of acceptance that mixes science fiction and romanticism queer The nights the friends spend together reaffirm their need to capture every minute of it, and it's in this acceptance of what's to come that Flanagan crafts the best sequences, as was the case with the devastating finale to The Curse of Bly Manor.
In addition, in the midnight club Many actors from his previous fiction appear, from Zach Gilford to Samantha Sloyan in a character that provides the magical (and disturbing) content. to a series that sometimes falters in its all-encompassing compulsion, but which represents another triumph for Flanagan and the fascinating universe he created in which it is now the teenagers who take the lead.
SOURCE: Reviews News
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