REVIEW: Saint Maud (2019)
Rose Glass’s Saint Maud explores the violence we do to ourselves.
by Chris Woodward
In a dreary English seaside town, in a dreary one-room flat, God speaks to Maud. God’s presence, when he speaks to her, fills her and leaves her in ecstatic, orgasmic states. God is not just reaching out to Maude for her own sake—God has given Maud a mission.
Director: Rose Glass
Screenplay: Rose Glass
Starring: Morfydd Clark, Jennifer Ehle
In Rose Glass’s feature film debut Saint Maud, Maud is a private home-care nurse tasked with the noble and yet thankless job of ushering cancer-stricken and terminally ill Amanda through her last days in comfort and peace. Maud, however, not only wants to assist with these corporeal duties but also believes that God has sent her to save Amanda’s soul.
Maud has the zealous fervor of the recently converted—she performs various acts of self-abnegation in pursuit of spiritual guidance. In opposition to Maud’s spirituality, Amanda’s whole being is driven by the material world. Before cancer, Amanda was a dancer and choreographer—her profession was the exaltation of the physical form. Her illness itself forces her (and us, the viewer) to focus on her physical being and its frailty; Amanda’s wispy, chemo-fried hair or the once-lithe dancer now bound to a wheelchair. Despite her illness, Amanda retains her carnality in that she continues to party, drink too much, and regularly has trysts with a younger woman.
It is this later situation that particularly reinforces Maud’s commitment to her mission and to the path of the martyr (which is no spoiler, as the movie literally puts Maud in league with the typical Catholic martyrs, the saints).
The film is among those that will undoubtedly be characterized by the lazy as “elevated horror”—in other words, it takes its symmetrical and precise cinematography cues from Kubrick’s The Shining rather than the gory, splatterfest of exploitation/grindhouse fare. Like other films deemed “elevated horror”, this film likewise deals with internal horrors externalized—either imagined, manifested, or real.
Saint Maud is less concerned with malevolent influences than with the violence we perpetrate upon ourselves.
Unlike the other “arthouse horror” movies of recent years, Saint Maud is less concerned with malevolent influence impacting the self. It’s more concerned with the violence we perpetrate upon ourselves.
Both unassuming and yet captivating, Morfydd Clark is a particular highlight as Maud. You spend the entire movie with her—and, from the very force of her faith (and from Clark’s performance), you can at times almost feel God, too.
Almost. Glass’s ultimate conclusion is deliberately ambiguous. The film depicts Maud’s struggle with her faith as a pyrrhic form of penance and yet denies a resolution of the tension between whether faith itself—or just Maud’s faith—is toxic. Thus, at the end, the question remains: has Maud been called to God to carry out a holy mission? Or is she merely another sad, lonely person under the boardwalk lights clutching her rosary too tight?
Chris Woodward is the co-host of Parents Just Don't Understand. He once dressed as the Phantom of the Opera for Halloween. He can be found on Twitter at @cwood157
