There are two versions of events playing out in Saint Maud, a bold, riveting horror film from first-time writer-director Rose Glass. One version exists in reality, the other in Maud’s head.
Maud’s head is the far more arresting, if terrifying, place to be. An extremely pious palliative-care nurse, Maud (Morfydd Clark) begins the film by praying in earnest for her latest client: Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a former dancer now confined to a wheelchair in her hilltop mansion with a terminal case of lymphoma. As Amanda expresses curiosity about Maud’s faith, the younger woman comes to believe that her calling may not only be physical—feeding, bathing, medicating, all of which we witness in the film’s early, methodical scenes—but spiritual. Indeed, Maud sets out to save Amanda’s soul.
It’s the “comes to believe” part where Glass, as a filmmaker, shows her gift for searing, religiously inspired imagery. Maud’s prayers, heard in voiceover, first put us in her headspace, and then we get the visions. One early example comes after Amanda teases Maud by calling her “my little savior;” Maud takes it literally and leaves the room in ecstasy. The lights in the mansion begin to throb as Maud makes her way up the stairs in a trance/dance (suggesting Maud is not only influenced by the dance videos she’s seen from Amanda’s career, but possibly also by Dario Argento’s Suspiria).
What follows is an eerie push and pull, as Maud becomes increasingly possessive of Amanda’s spiritual state, while Amanda playfully resists fully committing to conversion (Ehle is fantastic as a woman both bitter and baffled by her impending death). Throughout, Glass and cinematographer Ben Fordesman place Maud in ominous compositions, often placing her in an otherwise dark room with a spectral glow around her head. Even an establishing shot of Maud climbing the hill to Amanda’s mansion is discomfiting, as we watch her, from a distance, navigate a path between dark brambles, which pockmark the hill like patches of pubic hair.
As Maud, Clark wields weakness like a weapon. She’s demure, but increasingly devious, something Clark communicates with an increasing sharpness to her words and gestures. Amanda asks Maud at one point, “Have you seen a lot of death?” She replies, “Yes,” and her face looks like it: plain, post-shock, disturbingly impassive. (The movie opens with a vague but grotesque flashback that implies a traumatic event in her past.)
Maud is fully committed, and fully consumed. In another vision, Glass stages a moment of levitation that’s at once awful and ecstatic, its own transcendental triumph while also recalling similar sequences in Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice and Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. Maud, in voiceover, describes it as “revelation, and just in time,” but Glass is clever enough as a director to suggest that there may be more mundane factors at play: Maud’s drunkenness in that moment; a faucet left on, resulting in a torrent of “holy water;” fireworks going off outside her tiny apartment. Even the cockroach, which appears as an icky seer, we know to be a routine visitor.
Which returns us to the question of perspective. If this is all in Maud’s head (and I read the film’s final, inflammatory sequence, which I won’t spoil, as confirming this to be true), then what should we make of Maud? She’s not a force of evil, but a sick soul. Saint Maud, however, has little sympathy for Maud’s welfare, or interest in the roots of her spiritual fervor. (Did she pick up the tokens and disciplines from church or other religious horror movies?) In this, Saint Maud employs mental illness for shock theater, alongside a dose of Exorcist-style religious exploitation (there’s a limited interest in the actual theology at play). Just putting us in Maud’s head—even as grippingly as the filmmaking does here—is not the same as trying to empathize with her.
Still, the movie marks Glass as a filmmaker to watch. There is a split diopter shot at one point in which Maud picks at a scab in the foreground while, in equal focus, a crucifix falls off a dresser in the background. That’s Saint Maud at its unsettling best: using cinematic techniques to blur the line between things of the spirit and things of the damaged flesh.
