Saint Maud

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.

This is one of those movies where a couple of critics overdo their reviews and all the others feel they have to do the same or they will look dumb. So it gets overhyped. What happens here is a perfectly decent movie gets so hyped you are always going to be disappointed because it cannot possibly live up to that hyped reviewers drivel. Its a smart, clever movie that takes a while to get going, has a lot of padding and is not in any way a real horror film. It most certainly isnt "the scariest film of the decade" or whever that nonsense said. The lead is very good as is almost all the cast - pointless as some of them were. I liked the ending, thoiugh it was a little predictable. As an exploration of religious fervour in the wrong mind and the damage that can do, it certainly succeeds but if you are expecting the exorcist or anything like it, you will be disappointed. This is yet another example of critics trying to show how clever they are and at the same time, causing the movie to disappoint movie goers who, had they ignored those critics would probably have said, yeah, that was pretty good that - which is pretty much all it is. Scarborough is gorgeous as always though. if you've nebver been you should, quintessential English holiday spot.

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."

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.

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?