Regardless of whether you believe in one or not, faith and religion remain intertwined in a fascinating embrace of semantics, power and politics. The world, for better or worse, pivots around something that is, in a technical sense, quantifiably, unseen. Present through its absence, a perpetually roaming shadow of a once righteous body.
But what happens when that body returns, or purports to return in a form most tangible, and therefore, suspicious? Netflix’s Messiah, a 10-part series about the emergence of a mysterious man, who people believe to be the actual ‘messiah’ - his second coming - is both fascinating and thought-provoking.
Messiah merges the provisional American cynicism of Homeland with the psychological edginess of The Leftovers.
A lean ‘Al-Masih’ (Mehdi Dehbi), with a flowing mane and a perfect jawline, saves refugees in Damascus from an imminent ISIS assault, by ostensibly, calling in the favours of a sandstorm. He then leads a group of these ‘followers’ to the Israeli border where they resolve to sit silently. Consequently, he is taken prisoner by Israeli investigator Aviram, played with deft, guilt-ridden pathology and eye-sockets by Tomer Sisley.
A still from Messiah on Netflix.
On the American side of things, the event is seen as a duplicitous project to spawn a new wave of terrorist extremism. Leading this mission in second-guessing, is CIA agent Eva Geller, played with quiet authority by an ailing and lonely Michelle Monaghan. After events in Damascus, Al-Masih, inexplicably disappears from Israeli prison and lands in Texas where he comes to the rescue of the debt-ridden Father Felix (John Ortiz) whose trust in the lord has been on the wane.
Thereafter, Messiah turns into a socio-political situation, with state-level paranoia and social media hoodwinks thrown into the mix. Some believe in the messiah, some want to believe in it, while others are simply embittered by the randomness of it all. Could God just walk in into your life, without premonition or the skies turning red or some such inarticulate or absurd event? Al-Masih doesn’t claim to be God, but his ‘messenger’. He exhibits a capacity for miracles: saving the dead, blocking the inevitable and so on, but he doesn’t answer to any one provocation or prayer. Judaism, Catholicism or Islam, Messiah invites many to the table and through its multi-cultural milieu often succeeds in pointing to differences that are a matter of interpretation, like a poem, read incorrectly, for millions of years. In one scene, Geller tells Aviram ‘What was Jesus, after all? Just a populist politician with an ax to grind against the Roman Empire.’
As Al-Masih reaches Washington, he proposes a new path for ‘world peace’, a sort of distillation of all popular religions if you like. Geller, on the other side, continues her mission to unmask what she believes is a fraud with the sinister mission of ‘social disruption’ in his mind. But even rationalists, the show says, begin to crack when the unseemly happens. One can deny, but one can’t unsee, the show says.
The thing with religion is that it is the sublimation of a tactile script, one that remains wondrous and infallible until it begins to translate into the tangible. His Jesuit mane and pastoral demeanour notwithstanding, Al-Masih wears Nike hoodies and walks on the treadmill like any other human being. Between the odd miracle and the ordinariness of his everyday routine, Dehbi builds Messiah into a truly mysterious character, whose wisdom is neither otherworldly nor religiously specific. As if the new messianic age will be secular, and therefore, suspicious, perhaps even unacceptable to a world divided by religion.
Though Messiah plants enough doubt about its subject matter, it does manage to, at times, be profound.
In one scene, from the penultimate episode, two estranged friends find each other in a synagogue, one having become a young preacher and other a suicide bomber. Each coaxed, cajoled and pushed into their roles, evincing in one standstill moment of tragic personal history, beautifully filmed at the tip of a crescendo, the similarity in extremism of faith in God, and what some believe is his work – exacting some form of justice.
Messiah obviously has its flaws, as something with so many religious aspects naturally would. Even fiction can’t wipe clean the horrors of everyday life, the religious tension that is now a waking feeling. Though it boasts of decent actors, some performances in the series leave more gaps than they fill. For its panoramic view of most religions, it can be myopic about certain aspects of who it appeases and doesn’t.
The series has been called anti-Islamic and orientalist, and one can’t help but wonder how the same story would have been told had Al-Masih appeared in middle-brow California or some place in the US, first. Amidst those erring perspectives, however, Netflix has managed to put out a thoroughly entertaining and captivating show that is, on evidence of its climax, set up for a deeper dive in its second season.
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