For long excerpts of “Saint Maud”, the director-director Rose Glass’s first appearance, the psychological horror seems to be on the cusp of something. The tension feels drawn to its extremes and we seem to be on the brink of something newer, more specific, or something tangible. Depending on your own reading, that ‘something better’ might be the last picture of the film, which offers the closest thing to any kind of release in the film. Yet I wrestled with the ambiguity of a nearly studied “Saint Maud”.
When we meet Maud (a name she has just adopted), our alleged saint, she works as a carer for Amanda, a terminally ill dancer and choreographer with stage four lymphoma. Amanda is confined to a wheelchair, angry at her illness and worried about the impending death vacuum. Maud, religiously devotional and living a life with no personal desire beyond that religion, finds Amanda’s malice inspiring. That malice, she decides, is a sign from god. God has sent Amanda to perform the miracle of evangelization. He can save Amanda from atheist fate and convert her to the wonders of Catholicism. Not surprisingly, Amanda is less than enthusiastic.
It is not enough for Maud to gently push Amanda into the light, but to love God – Maud’s jealous God – she must renounce her present sinful life. To cope with her pain and loss, Amanda drinks, enjoys a pleasant relationship with a female sex worker she regularly sees, and enjoys being a maudlin and sometimes breaking up. At first, Amanda’s resistance only gives Maud more certainty, but over time that resistance builds into anger and resentment as religious ambition soon turns into religious fanaticism. Horror has long been concerned with exploring the thin line between faith and fanaticism, but “Saint Maud” feels more like flirtation than exploration. This is familiar ground, and a basis for potential excellence. “Saint Maud” keeps building, and building, and building. But he never feels like he’s reaching his point.
Glass Little by little informs us about key pieces of information about Maud. Except that they are deliberately filtered down to us in vague ways. Maud, who was once Katie, worked as a nurse but left the job after tragic misconduct with a patient. Glass gives us this information in a cyclical way, suggesting ambiguity – though we’re never sure what to serve. Her religiosity is new. After her traumatic work experience, she has turned to Catholicism as a way of coping.
Morfydd Clark, like Maud, plays the intensity of that devotion well. For long parts of the film, we stay with her alone, observing what feels like her descent into madness, but also feeling like a credible certainty of one’s own fate. She’s troubled, but she also seems to exist with a clarity we can’t quite understand. It is ambitious to keep ourselves firmly locked inside Maud, but the film operates so much through Maud that our theft of any inside of its main character finally shuts us off own work. There are gripping moments that aim at ideas of isolation as central to belief, about grief, fear and desire. The sequences in which Maud seems abominable and want Amanda’s sexual dalliances inject valuable tension into the narrative. But what’s in service?
So much of the film is about suffering. Jennifer Ehle as Amanda is especially included in this, dripping with contempt and self-hatred and turning her rejection of her current state into an insightful presentation of anger and pain. However, there is a metaphor somewhere for pointless suffering, when Glass seems to be largely ambiguous to any of the foundations of that suffering. The concept is sharp, but beneath the surface there is so much staring. Early on, when Maud admits to hearing God’s voice Ehle’s incredible look of shock is precise. As Maud begins to talk about his religious prowess, the sexual significance is immediate. The film’s best sequence is a moment of prayer made perverse, erotic, and title. It feels like the movie is on the cusp of something more bold. And then … he retreats. We are still watching because the astounding concepts feel like they are in store for something more we are waiting for. It’s not bad filmmaking, it just feels incomplete.
And, yet, there is much to recommend about “Saint Maud” that even my own ambiguity seems punctuated by the burdens of the film itself and the way it announces itself as something for examination. It’s not so much a question of whether it’s scary or not – the film never approaches anything resembling true terrorism to me – as much as it speaks to the annoying fissures of being on your own and wrestle with that monotony. It’s interesting for those goals to scare the real world, but that feels less like a matter of the film’s impact and more about the possibilities we could bring to it. Because who has not addressed those feelings of loneliness? Glasswork here is promising in that way. She has a clear focus of what she wants, and her conceptualization here is amazingly precise. Even if “Saint Maud” never feels like it’s going nowhere, it’s not a depressing journey.
Saint Maud is available for streaming on Prime Video and other platforms.