Saint Maud

The elements of thrill and horror are negligible in this movie. Does that mean it isn't good? Not quite, rather that the marketing campaign went terribly wrong and people are left feeling being mis-sold. I don't blame them. All in all a better than average psychological drama that will leave undisturbed the most. Word of advice for hardcore horror fans: cancel any expectation you might have of getting scared watching this because chances are you won't.

Because it's more than that. It's also a study of loneliness (of both main characters) and obsession. It does have its shock moments, not least when in becomes clear that Maud is not the clear-cut character you thought she was.

As I left the cinema, I quoted Dave Allen to myself: "I'm an atheist, thank God."

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.

An uptight religious nurse becomes the caregiver of a cancer-striken dancer and tries to save her soul in the most disturbing of ways.

Saint Maud is what happens when you take all the hallmarks of an A24 movie and shove them into a blender. The result is somewhat interesting, but will leave a bitter taste in your mouth. It's definitely not a film to watch if you're already feeling under the weather or depressed, because it might very well send you over the edge. The ending seems almost telegraphed from the start. You know nothing is going to end well for any of these sad people.

How much you enjoy Saint Maud will depend on how high your tolerance for somber and depressing psychodramas is. It's certainly well shot and has a great central performance by Morfydd Clark to recommend it.

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?