Saint Maud

Is religious fanaticism a form of mental illness? Certainly people such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett would argue it is. However, from the perspective of the fanatic, such fanaticism is often not only logical and justified, but unavoidable; they don't choose to be fanatical, they are compelled to be fanatical. The disparity between what a fanatic believes and what other people believe is the main issue examined in Saint Maud, the stunning debut feature from writer/director Rose Glass. Part-horror, part-psychological thriller, part-character drama, part-ecclesiastical treatise, Saint Maud can be read in a variety of ways - an analysis of the interaction between faith and self; a threnody for the life of a young woman suffering a mental breakdown; a drama about loneliness; a tale of possession; a tragedy about the frailty of the human body. Told mainly (although not entirely) from the perspective of a fanatical Christian, the story makes room for the possibility that, however unlikely, such fanaticism isn't mental illness at all and that God really is communicating with this person. And this magnificently handled ambiguity is the film's trump card. Disturbing, horrifying, challenging, unpredictable, emotional, and occasionally very funny, this is a film that forges a path entirely its own, and is as impressive and daring a directorial debut as you're ever likely to find.

In a thoroughly depressing English seaside town, Maud (an incredibly physical performance from Morfydd Clark) is a recent convert to Roman Catholicism. Exceptionally devout, she believes that mankind is amoral, lustful, and wicked, and that only by way of a true saviour can we be saved. Is she that saviour? It's possible, because God has explicitly told her that He has very special plans for her in the near future. Meanwhile, Maud is working as a private palliative care nurse, and the story begins as she arrives for her first day with Amanda Köhl (the always brilliant Jennifer Ehle); a formerly world-famous American dancer and choreographer suffering from end-stage spinal lymphoma. She and Maud get on well - Maud admires her strength of character and zest for life, whilst she wants to help Maud let her hair down a little. However, there are certain elements of Amanda's life of which Maud does not approve; most significantly, the frequent visits from Carol (Lily Frazer), Amanda's lover. When catastrophe strikes and a dark secret from Maud's past threatens to resurface, Maud decides to prove to Amanda, God, and everyone else just how far mankind has fallen and just how sanctified she really is.

Although Maud is a hard-line fundamentalist, Glass refuses to dismiss her, arguing instead that such individuals genuinely believe they really are communicating with the Divine - Maud may be mentally ill, but even if that is the case (and the film is in no rush to confirm that it is), then surely she deserves compassion and kindness, so completely has her mind bent reality to support her delusion. Glass tells much of the story from Maud's subjective perspective, and in this sense, it's almost understandable when she sees signs of God's presence in everyday things (an inexplicable whirlpool in a glass of beer, for example) - this may be delusion, but if it is, it's a total delusion that she is powerless against. In a very real sense, she cannot be held accountable for her actions.

Even irrespective of mental health issues, however, Maud is all-in on the whole Catholic thing. She tells God, for example, about how important her work is, as it allows her to "save souls" and she credits her recent conversion to Catholicism as reversing the downward spiral of her life. She's also a firm adherent of the Job school of faith-by-suffering, cheerfully telling a beggar, "never waste your pain" and later engaging in some truly gnarly DIY shoemaking.

Along the same lines, she tolerates Amanda's little digs about her life and how lonely she seems, but when Amanda turns her caustic wit to Catholicism, Maud is unable to let that stand without offering rebuke. Her relationship with Amanda forms much of the film's narrative backbone, with neither woman allowed to occupy the moral high-ground. Amanda is profoundly bored with her illness, and her isolation and inability to leave the house mean she seizes on this strange, ultra-serious young woman who has come to look after her. Amanda is not a villain any more than Maud, but she does regard Maud as a plaything, not with the intention of hurting Maud, but with the intention of amusing herself.

As strong as Saint Maud is thematically, however, where it really excels is in its aesthetic design. Glass directs the hell out of it, and there's not a weak link amongst her crew - from Ben Fordesman's murky cinematography to Paulina Rzeszowska's detailed production design to Paul Davies's oppressive sound design to Adam Janota Bzowski's creepy score to Mark Towns's ambiguous editing (including a shocking slam cut right at the end that's as brilliantly jarring and thematically crucial as anything in the work of Nicolas Roeg).

Crucial to the overall aesthetic is how Glass handles perspective; most (although, crucially, not all) of the film is told from Maud's perspective, so we encounter her visions not as an objective third-party would, but as she does. So, when she sees a small whirlpool spontaneously appear in a glass of beer, we see the same thing, and there's no cutaway to show us Maud staring at a normal glass; when a towel placed near a crucifix falls to the ground for no obvious reason, we see it as she does, and there's nothing to objectively suggest why it may have fallen; when God talks to her (in Welsh, no less), we hear His voice as she does, and there's no portion of the scene where we see Maud answering a voice we cannot hear.

Along the same lines, what are we to make of the many (many) shots of Maud with windows or lights in the background that create a halo effect? Or of the shot of her walking on the beach, with a thin layer of water covering the sand, which is framed in such a way that it looks like she's walking on water? One particular scene near the end of the film, which I won't go into as it would be a spoiler, is especially important in the construction of a subjective point of view - what we're seeing couldn't possibly be anything other than psychosis, and yet the film has given us very little to confirm such a reading. Could it be that what Maud is experiencing is real? Is this scene confirmation that her mind has irreparably snapped, or is it confirmation that she was completely sane all along? Constructing a scene based on two literally inverse interpretations can't be easy, yet Glass does it so smoothly, you won't even realise the sharp dichotomy until it's all over.

Running only 84 minutes, it's extraordinary how much Glass squeezes into her debut feature; from the arresting performances by Clark and Ehle to the thematic complexity to the extraordinarily well-handled perspectival ambiguity to the haunting aesthetic design. Looking at issues such as trauma, faith, fundamentalism, sexuality, and human impermanence, the film has much more going on than the generic horror elements one might expect. Either a depiction of the mental collapse of a young woman or a study of the supernatural, the film is built on ambiguity. One of the best directorial debuts I've seen in a long time, I was only half-way through and I was already looking forward to whatever Glass does next. Saint Maud probably won't break any box-office records, but we are going to be hearing a lot from Rose Glass in the future.

It's like Rosie Glass saw a number of Paul Schrader "I'm going to narrate my anguish and misery and self-influcted contradictory impulses while also making myself suffer in a physical way" films and said "but... I can go a little further - and with a woman!" This isnt at all a bad thing and Glass's vision is striking and with psychologically rich and even dangerous compositions as we're plopped into Maud's unruly consciousness. I'm sure there are and will be interpretations about whether she is simply a total nutter who is deteriorating in her mind, or if this battle between someone who has been anointed by God and is torturing herself so she can be ready to face our against THE DEVIL or what have you.

By the end, I didn't think the film necessarily reconciled the two poisitons all that strongly, as in everything is so in her head that the conclusion makes it pretty clear (at least to me) that she lost her grip on reality through her Faith with a capital F. Or I should put it that the film is a dark and harrowing journey into someone's inner being ripped apart piece by piece, but by the end if it means to be ambiguous it's been a little too basic to earn it. All the same, Glass and Clark makes this remarkable through their total commitment to making this woman's descent so deeply felt and pained, using the camera as this point of pain at times where what Maud is seeing in a room (like the big cockroach) is aiding in this warped sense of things.

This is all to say that the film this would very well to be paired with, though not exactly the same genre, is really Benedetta, another story of someone so totally in the thrall of the Lord to where it turns the world upside down, but where that film benefitted from the larger place her and other women had in society and the reactions to what happened with that title character, Saint Maud is about making the internal the external, and that can only be sustained for so long. But I have to stress that if you're in the mood for this sort of heart-wrenching spiritual-existential horror, Clark and in particular Jennifer Ehle in a key supporting role create an atmosphere that is perfectly dreadful.

Religion, ain't it something else?

My problem with Saint Maud is I was expecting a horror movie and this isn't. Maud is a character study of a young nurse (Morfydd Clark) in emotional turmoil. Saint Maud sets a dour mood. It favors symbolism over hard core action. I'm not saying it's a bad movie. I didn't find enough to hold on to. Details about Maud, the person, are sparse and come too late in the movie. By then I had lost interest.

Maud is a hospice nurse for Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a former dancer suffering from terminal cancer. She holds to her devout faith with slavish piousness. She left her previous nursing job abruptly, we aren't sure why. She sees things no one else sees that border on the paranormal. She comes to believe she has been sent to save Amanda's soul. Why? I didn't understand why Maud was obsessed with Amanda. The two women didn't really connect and had little in common.

The character of Amanda is excellent, by the way. She was full of contradictions, capable of great tenderness and terrible cruelty. When she is on screen I wanted to know more about her but the focus remains squarely on Maud.

Clark's performance as Maud is empathetic but a bit one note. She too often has a deer in the headlights gaze and seems out of step with the world around her. If that is the intent, Clark did her job well. I wasn't able to connect with the character. She experiences one ominous happening after another, but the action doesn't build to a focused point. I felt like I was drifting at sea watching Maud. She is clearly a young woman full of doubt and conflict. Yet, I wasn't getting to know the real her.

The strange events happening may be real or may all be in the mind of one disturbed individual. We are never given enough concrete evidence to decide. Perhaps that's the point but after a while I felt like I was running on a treadmill. It takes until the last few scenes to move the narrative forward. These scenes are genuinely scary, disturbing and moving. Sadly, the payoff comes too late, in my opinion.

There are essentially two ways to read 'Saint Maud (2019)', though its final half-second pretty much tells you exactly which reading is preferred - intended, even - by its writer/director, and it constantly keeps you flittering back and forth between these readings until its final few frames (literally). A film focusing on a deeply religious character is always going to be controversial, even if it doesn't depict her doing fanatical and dangerous things, but I don't think that the picture is condemning religion itself. In fact, I don't think it's 'about' religion at all. Instead, it's about loneliness. Maud is a deeply flawed protagonist, spiralling further and further into her own personal delusions as she exhibits increasingly harmful behaviour. However, it's typically easy to empathise with her, without condoning her actions. The movie starts off more or less as a straight drama, seeing our lead take on a new position as an at-home nurse for an ex-dancer with late-stage leukaemia. There are levels of enigmatic dread running through this segment of the film, mainly thanks to the director's willingness to slow things down and gnaw away at the audience, but things don't really slip into proper horror territory until around halfway through. Even then, the horror is mostly subtle. There are some elements of wince-inducing body-horror but most of the scary stuff is psychological. It becomes increasingly clear just how entrenched we are within Maud's perspective, as we begin to get glimpses of the way she sees the world, and it's never clear what's actually 'real'. This keeps you on your toes until the thing reaches its somewhat surprising yet simultaneously inevitable conclusion. For the most part, the affair walks the line between supernatural and psychological with poise. There are only a couple of moments in which it wobbles, with one sequence in particular feeling as though it crosses that line a little, but they aren't all that bothersome once you've cemented your final reading of the narrative (which, again, will either be confirmed or entirely upended by the last half-second). It's a really interesting, engaging and effective experience overall. It's also achingly well-made, with some phenomenal cinematography and brilliantly low-key performances. It's distinct, it's disturbing and it sticks with you. 8/10.

"Saint Maud" follows the titular Maud, a young hospice nurse in a small, dreary English seaside village who takes a job caring for Amanda, a cancer-stricken, middle-aged American dancer and bon vivant living in a secluded mansion on the hillside. Maud, a recent Catholic convert prone to her own bizarre visions, comes to believe that caring for the dying Amanda is her mission and purpose--a soul to save. But at what price?

This insular and occasionally shocking feature debut by director Rose Glass is, though marketed as a horror film, really more a psychological examination of abject loneliness and descent into madness. In some ways, it feels like it could have been written first as a novel, and that's part of what makes the film unique. The film's largest achievement is that it successfully operates on a number of levels, functioning as a meditation on loneliness, a portrait of a nervous breakdown, a hagiographic tragedy, as well as (possibly) a demonic possession story.

Ultimately, at its base level, "Saint Maud" is a character study reflected between the two dichotomous central characters: Maud, the lonely, psychologically-fragile nurse obsessed with matters of the spirit; and Amanda, a woman who has lived for the pleasures of the flesh (the fact that she was a dancer, a profession strongly appertained with the physical body, is no symbolic coincidence). Their philosophical clashing of perspectives ultimately shatters Maud, though she manages to rebuild her absolution in a terrifying way. Both characters are delicately portrayed by Morfydd Clark and Jennifer Ehle, respectively, and the film would not work without the strength they bring to each.

All in all, this film is a dour portrait of both mental decline and spiritual ecstasy, depending on how one wants to look at it. Glass puts forth her own take in the film's final frame, which almost veers too far into hokey territory, but in the end, "Saint Maud" manages to be a potent (and depressing) examination of one person's tragic search for purpose. 8/10.