A Fraud
All unhappy families may be unique; all unhappy TV towns are decidedly exactly alike.
In Bridgeville, Maine, the football players are bullies and rapists; the gays at odds with their fathers; the women either wounded resistors to its culture of “white male aggression” (actual words said by a character in this show) or shrill collaborators.
At one point, a schoolteacher (recently fired for teaching sex ed) sits on a park bench with her husband as they gaze across what must surely must be a million dollar view.
“It’s pretty,” he says, with the love of newcomer.
“Not if you look closely,” she responds, with the bitterness of a longtime resident.
Just hours later, her sixteen year old daughter is raped by a football player at a high school party.
You get the idea. It’s that kind of town.
Over the course of the first episode of Netflix’s new series, The Mist, it becomes clear that any gleeful frights will come at a steep price: being forced to sit through a lazy TV writer’s microcosm of society updated for the social justice age – no doubt dreamed up while eating Captain Crunch at 1pm on the Sunday before the pitch meeting.
Hence lines to the tune of “I’ll use my white male privilege to stare at these hot football jocks!”
Even the writers of Dear White People, a show not known for its subtlety, would wince.
And so it goes for what feels like hours (likely 45 minutes), as we begin to hope desperately that the eponymous mist will show up and take as many of these unbelievable characters with it.
Sadly, when it finally does, the creatures within in its murky brume manage only a local cop and a shrill soccer mom. I’ve seen swarms of bees take out more people.
The rest of Bridgeville’s denizens hunker down in malls and such for the long haul – friends, odd couples, and victims trapped with their tormentors (we smell a twist or two).
Will we continue watching? Not a chance.
Because The Mist is a fraud. It’s not horror. It’s trite social drama masquerading as horror. And we can see how its creators may have thought themselves clever for the charade.
But the horror genre was a rich mine for social commentary – particularly about gender dynamics – long before The Mist rolled in.
Far more interesting conversations can be had after a viewing of, say, Last House on the Left, I Spit on Your Grave, Straw Dogs, Rosemary’s Baby, Dawn of the Dead, and virtually all of Cronenberg’s early “body horror” movies, than any of the surface level polemic plastered onto The Mist.
Our guess is that most of this show will be spent playing footsy with semi-pro critics on the Huffington Post, with 20% or so involving running from building to building as monsters pick off the least “woke” of the group.
Still, if nothing else, The Mist is a show of its time – utterly devoid of a point, but thickly lacquered with the appearance of one.