Saint Maud (2021)

Score: 4.5 / 5

And just like that, newcomer Rose Glass bursts into the horror scene with a daring, confident feature film. The material may not be totally fresh, but her uncompromising vision of it is the kind of deliberate, measured, and aggressively strange work of a veteran filmmaker. Saint Maud is, to be sure, an independent film and has probably pittance for a budget, but necessity breeds invention, and Glass is certainly delivering on that creative front. Moody and brooding, the immersive experience is akin to being baptized: an inspired color scheme of greenish hues and thick darkness interrupted by thin rays of light gives a visual impression of being submerged. The horror creeps in when you realize that the film isn't letting us come back up for air.

The story, too, is immersive: we're situated quite close to the title character's perspective. Maud (an unbelievably nuanced Morfydd Clark) is a live-in nurse in Scarborough in Yorkshire. Previously working in a hospital, it seems she has been traumatized by a violent death under her hands, precipitating her choice to switch to palliative care. It also may have initiated her apparently sudden conversion to Roman Catholicism and the religious piety that often dictates the behaviors and thoughts of zealots. Maud (we learn it's a new name she likely gave herself out of devotion) is our only fully-fleshed character here, and she's in every single scene; the camera often hovers close to her, forcing us to be aware of her quiet intensity at all times. Her prayers form the occasional basis for voiceover narration, and her discussions with God are quite conversational, even sometimes casual; when things don't go her way later in the film, she even scolds Him slightly. If this doesn't sound exactly right theologically, your suspicions are correct.

Hired to care for Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a famous former choreographer dying from cancer, Maud seems intent on also saving her soul. It's the spiritual zeal of any recent convert, but Maud's actual experience with the church is vague at best. Unlikely that she had any formal means of ingratiating or acclimating to a bona fide congregation, her behavior increasingly suggests a shattered psyche, one that is suffering from intense (and self-imposed) isolation, chastisement, and torture. We don't get much of this until later in the film, but the breadcrumbs are in place long before we're aware the filmmakers are guiding us down a thin, winding path. Though clearly unbalanced and harboring dark secrets, Maud seems a responsible and well-meaning caregiver to her charge, a vain and proud woman surrounding herself with relics of her famed past and desperate attempts to feel pleasure before death claims her: she drinks a lot, smokes even more, and sleeps with a young woman she met online. Maud is horrified and determined to save Amanda from damnation.

It's hard to discuss this movie in linear terms, so do forgive my hopping around. I went in knowing precious little about the film, and thus found its deliberate and enigmatic unraveling to be endlessly pleasurable. Glass is taking us for a ride, mobilized by an actress and a character so beguiling and fascinating that I had absolutely no idea what would happen next. And the experience -- for indeed, Glass intends us to feel Maud more than understand her -- is harrowing. Much like the main characters of Taxi Driver or even Carrie, Maud is just a little wrong, a little off, but because we're kept so close to her narratively and visually, we don't really "get it" until about the halfway point of the film. In the rare moments we're taken out of her tight perspective, we see the reactions of others to her words and her behaviors, and we gather that she's intensely uncomfortable and unwelcome. She rubs literally everyone the wrong way. As an unreliable narrator, she's remarkably opaque. The film feels like a Paul Schrader feature in its relative disregard for plot and its hyper-awareness of itself as a character study. More than once, I thought of First Reformed; then again, it also fits into the recent drive of indie horror that is vaguely religious such as Amulet and She Dies Tomorrow. It barely even interrogates its own religious tenets, but rather focuses on the performative religiosity of its desperate, isolated protagonist.

By the end, we do know more about Maud and how she came to be this way. But it's not treated as an epiphany or explanation; if anything, the film uses that to say all that matters is what she'll do next. Clark plays the character like an ethereal spirit, floating through the world (she is, at least once, wheeled through the location to appear uncannily levitating) but operating on a different plane of existence. The film occasionally challenges our perception of reality, too, by morphing her face into a grotesque, gaping gasp of ecstasy (or torment?), by darkening the faces of those around her into demoniac jeers, by imbuing Amanda with diabolic knowledge and power. And while the final result of all this is ultimately less a story than a warning -- if you subscribe to needing a message in films -- and perhaps not the most urgent one at that, it's a hell of an experience.