Critics reviews

The movie rises to a fine frenzy of practical madness, and Glass makes much—briefly, but memorably—of the contrast between the real and the imagined. Yet the inattention to the details of Maud’s surroundings, the processes behind her acts of fury, suggest an incuriosity that’s, unfortunately, common in the current cinema.

Glass has an uncanny sense of how to use the environment—blasted, windswept beaches and creaky old amusement parks—to reflect her main character’s fragile mental state.

It's exciting when newcomers like Glass arrive with a fully-fleshed-out and confidently executed vision, particularly when the vision is eccentric, difficult, and strange.

Formally controlled and visually elegant, “Saint Maud” has a dark, spoiled beauty and a shifting point of view that questions Maud’s distorted vision.

So subtly does Glass negotiate the shifts between intimate kitchen-sink pathos and shrieking supernatural surrealism, often within the space of a single scene, that Saint Maud seems to takes on a shape-shifting quality as it slips between the inner and outer realms of Maud’s experience.

Glass borrows a page from psychoanalysis by portraying zealous spirituality as psychosomatic, but gives neither the religious dogma nor medicine a final say.

Saint Maud is a debut that already feels like a career-high not only because of its aesthetic proficiency but, also, in the way it handles conceptual dichotomies.

Glass’s film, which she both wrote and directed, is a magnificent slow-burner, a portrait of a woman headed toward an apocalypse of the self.

The film’s classiness lies in the way that, by and large, it sticks to purely psychological unease and to a realistic depiction of Maud’s mentally and economically distressed world, superbly evoked in Paulina Rzeszowksa’s production design and in Ben Fordesman’s camerawork, which just occasionally adds expressionistic touches to a register that generally steers closer to the everyday.

This extremely promising debut can become didactic as it circles the drain between truth and delusion, and such either/or stakes have a way of making the movie feel even smaller than its 83-minute runtime might suggest, but Glass refuses to stay on the fence.

That ambiguity of genre, never entirely resolved, may frustrate some viewers, but it's clear Glass knows exactly what she's doing as she keeps adding thin layers of meaning and texture to the narrative. This smart, sinister work represents a very arresting calling card which augurs very well for her future prospects.

As daring and testing an examination of the comforts and limits of religion as any we’ve seen recently, “Saint Maud” is no less thoughtful or compassionate for being dressed up — very stylishly, let it be said — in the trappings of horror.