But Glass’s small-scale tragedy of devotion metastasizing into something demonic has grandeur all the same. There isn’t a jump scare or a CGI effect wasted. Saint Maud is a modest production: tight, compact, and under 90 minutes. (If Maud has the look of an avenging angel by the film’s end, she’s one following a self-fulfilling prophecy.) At times, Saint Maud’s alternately stringent and deep-red imagery feels borrowed-from von Trier, as well as his hero Andrei Tarkovsky-but this is less a case of thievery than a gifted filmmaker’s ambitious (and mostly successful) attempt to connect herself to a cinematic spiritual lineage. Where Glass truly recalls von Trier is in her skill at dramatizing the kind of all-consuming martyr complex that can’t be psychoanalyzed away, and which eventually crosses over from being a burden to a means of liberation, a state of grace in which there’s nothing left to be exorcised.Ĭlark’s performance is a study in coiled tension gradually going unsprung, which crucially isn’t played for clichéd mania but an earnest and unlikely form of self-actualization.
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The upshot of this approach is a wonderfully paranoid sense of clarity: In lieu of judging its namesake, the film communicates what it’s like to see the world through her piously downcast eyes and live inside her pale, all-too-vulnerable skin (which she razes regularly as a form of atonement). Glass makes a number of savvy directorial choices throughout Saint Maud, and the sharpest is to limit what we see, hear, and know to her heroine’s point of view. In other words: How do you solve a problem like Maud? From there, the question of whether Maud’s relationship to faith is genuinely ecstatic or a mask for guilty self-loathing incurred by past failures is replaced by a bigger issue: whether or not she’s sociopathic, and what’s going to happen to the people around her as a result. Maud’s tenderness and patience seem infinite, at least until the older woman tells her that she’s an atheist the reason that Amanda isn’t ready to meet her maker is because she doesn’t think he’s there in the first place.
Amanda, a former choreographer who now uses a wheelchair, retains a lust for life (and flesh) that only gains in intensity as her condition worsens. Maud is young and strong but hobbled by religious devotion she doesn’t get out much and it doesn’t go well when she does. Glass has some of von Trier’s ecstatic boldness and mordant humor as well the contrast between hospice nurse Maud (Morfydd Clark) and her lymphoma-stricken charge Amanda (Jennifer Ehle) suggests a kind of bickering, metaphysical odd couple. With its windswept seaside setting and story of a young woman who believes she has a direct line to the Almighty, Saint Maud could be seen as an homage to Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves. The only evidence she has of this mission is her own belief.
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In Saint Maud-an impressive directorial debut by 31-year-old British writer-director Rose Glass that is the best new horror movie of 2021 so far-the protagonist knows, to a certainty, that God has tasked her with saving a dying woman’s soul.
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