In the canon of religious horror films—exemplified by Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973)—the devil has long made a habit of weaponizing the female body. If a possession intervenes between the body and soul, for the pious and unbelieving alike, the corporeal tends to betray or eclipse the spiritual, and so the devil seems to have the upper hand. In Saint Maud, the sophisticated debut feature from writer-director Rose Glass, the divine could not be more physical, as flesh-ripping as it is orgasmic.
Morfydd Clark plays an eccentric young nurse who, in the wake of trauma, has converted to what looks an awful lot like Catholicism and has newly christened herself Maud. Now working in hospice care, her latest charge is a formerly feted dancer, Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), debilitated by what appears to be cancer. Amanda, an atheist, generally finds Maud’s piety amusing, if sometimes endearing. Maud, meanwhile, is seduced: Amanda is worldly and elegant, with a serpentine sensuality that attests to the craft that once made her such a success. As Amanda’s body gives way, Maud tasks herself with saving the woman’s soul. But far from merely a prim, awkward zealot, she proves herself surprisingly enigmatic.
The character already arrives to us bracketed with a kind of duplicity. She has shed one identity, and so a past, which nonetheless spills into her present between the unwelcome return of an old acquaintance (Lily Knight) and sleekly cut, viridian-toned flashbacks to a catatonic Maud covered in blood. Even more peculiar, her experience of God seems unusually carnal. In one scene she sprawls across the stairs, trembling and gasping, her head thrown back in the grips of some phantom ecstasy. Her constant supplications to God, however, in chilling voiceover narration reveal a palpable anguish that Amanda later names: “You must be the loneliest girl I’ve ever seen.”
Despite a more populated social life, Amanda seems almost as lonesome, secluded in her sepulchral mansion where she teeters between depression and boredom, understandably determined to wring as much pleasure (drugs, alcohol, sex) as she can out of the time left to her, much to Maud’s chagrin. Both, too, are curiously unmoored—Maud is Welsh; Amanda presumably American—with seemingly no family to tie them to the grim English seaside town (much of it shot in Scarborough) where they find themselves. Nothing quite communicates nation like religion, and both conspire to map culture—which is to say, borders—onto women’s bodies. It is not insignificant that Maud has become a Christian (borrowing significantly but not exclusively from the Catholic tradition) in a broadly secular country, and that Amanda believes in nothing at all. Each in her own way has rejected community, and with it subterranean cultural demands on their bodies. Amanda is at home in her body even as it fails her, while young Maud wants nothing more than to transcend hers.
Their mutual sexual attraction is obvious from the beginning. At first Glass teases the possibility of an affair: Amanda remarks on Maud’s looks. Ben Fordesman’s camera simulates Maud’s roving gaze during physical exercises and baths. Compelled by jealousy or divine will—God’s interests so often conveniently dovetail with her own—she attempts to get rid of Amanda’s favorite escort, Carol (a charismatic Lily Frazer). The violent outburst that follows her overstep leaves her without a job, and Maud unravels fantastically. Idle hands and all that.
Glass situates herself confidently in the genre, weaving dark humor into thick, portentous tension, punctuated with sparse but indelible jump scares. Her equally ornate short films Storm House (2011) and Room 55 (2014) also bear a touch of horror, or at least the uncanny, and suggest a curiosity about the nature of loneliness, within or outside of relationships, that she beautifully polishes here. Meanwhile, Fordesman delivers us into Maud’s dismal interiority with spectral lighting and Goyaesque greens and browns, smudging the lines between real and imagined, culminating in a stunning finale that never quite resolves how much of this has been in Maud’s head. The film pivots on this rich ambivalence. Ehle plays Amanda with refined relish, one that hones in on the tale’s central ambiguity so that she emerges, even in her bouts of cruelty, as largely inscrutable. The endlessly compelling Clark embodies vulnerable, nervous energy with impressive dexterity that equally leaves room for her more volatile impulses. The film is her vehicle completely, and the eloquence of her performance animates it.
As audiences sort through the anxieties of a hopelessly death-haunted woman driven mad by shame, the film charts the migrations of a genre that has long rendered women monstrous. Saint Maud bears natural traces of Bergman—Persona (1966), of course, and Cries & Whispers (1972), even the slow-building eeriness Hour of the Wolf (1968)—and it has much in common with Carrie (1976), but even in her reverence, Glass has built something entirely new out of the syntax. Maud’s adopted faith clearly provides a path for her to perform her guilt, to exact the cost of perceived crimes upon her flesh. She derives more satisfaction from walking on the nails she places in the soles of her shoes—bloody proof of her devotion—than she does from initiating a sexual encounter we witness, with a man she picks up at a pub and which quickly turns disturbing. Amanda’s brand of hedonism does not quite fit Maud whose self-loathing makes her an enemy to herself. In a delicious slice of cheek she has taken a name that means “powerful battler,” given how long religion has been essential to conquest, and fittingly, she can only marshal her attraction to her employer in the terms of spiritual warfare. Whether she is vying to win Amanda’s soul for God or to possess Amanda herself may seem easy enough to answer, but like everything in Saint Maud requires a double take.
The film may garner comparisons to Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017), or the upcoming, somewhat more conventional Rose Plays Julie. But in the era of so-called “elevated horror,” Glass’s exquisitely unsettling film pays homage to a historically complicated and fascinating genre while forging original new ground all her own.
