[Film Review] Saint Maud (2020)

Rose Glass’s debut feature Saint Maud is an alarmingly brilliant, unnerving and enigmatic psychological horror touching upon themes of psychosexual-confusion, mental illness and religious belief. Maud, a disturbed and recently converted Catholic nurse, is assigned to care for Amanda, a celebrated former dancer who is dying of cancer. Maud begins to believe that it is her duty to save Amanda’s soul which leads her into a whirling vortex of dangerous obsession and ascetic fanaticism.               

Firstly, the central performances are fantastic. As the titular Maud, Morfydd Clark delivers a particularly haunting, terrifying and heart-breaking portrait of a traumatised woman, isolated and unable to find genuine connection with others. Clark exudes a lost, child-like intensity which is sympathetic as it is deeply troubling. Jennifer Ehle is also wonderful as the chain-smoking, caustic Amanda. As a cancer patient, I’m generally not a fan of using cancer sufferers as the backdrop for another character’s emotional crisis, however I found Amanda to be a thoughtfully written character and devoid of irritating sentimental cliches. She is given a level of dimensionality rarely afforded to the terminally ill in horror films – of course we sympathize with her, but we also know she’s a bit of a dick and is unromantically bored senseless by her illness. Maud and Amanda’s fraught patient and carer relationship and the constant uses of visual doubling to highlight their shared and opposing mental and physical traumas also reminded me greatly of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). Surely it is also no coincidence that Amanda’s famous dance piece is called The Electra Complex and Persona’s patient Elisabet falls mute during a performance of Sophocles’ Electra?

Whilst it is a slow burn of a horror film, the economic use of special effects is powerful and I found myself genuinely terrified by the paroxysms of body horror. Additionally, the chilling, nerve-jangling score and outstanding sound design reminded me of Mica Levi’s best work in Under the Skin (2013). Although the film appears to be set in the present day, the excellent production design has a disorientating, old-fashioned quality reminiscent of the 50s aesthetic in Glass’s excellent short film Room 55 (2017). I’m always a fan of using gloomy British seaside towns for horrific effect and Scarborough’s nightmarish neon landscape is successfully utilised to evoke a real sense of claustrophobia and loneliness. Additionally, the dark but sometimes comical domestic setting would sit happily in the Shirley Jackson universe (the Shirleyverse?). On that note, there are some tantalising whispers of the occult throughout - a soup bubbles like a witch’s cauldron, Maud possibly has a familiar, and one scene even reminded me of a particularly pivotal moment in The Witch (2015).

The best horror films about religion and spirituality examine the inescapability of the corporeal and Saint Maud certainly continues this tradition. Not only is Maud plagued by physical pain, but she experiences forceful religious ecstasies (reminiscent of Sister Jeanne’s erotic hallucinations in The Devils (1971)) that point towards a  psychosexual confusion given that her trauma appears to be connected with her pre-conversion ‘sinful’ lifestyle. But one of the most rewarding aspects of Saint Maud is how certain scenes and questions linger in the mind long after the credits have rolled. At one point Amanda tells Maud “No one sees what they don’t want to,” and the film skillfully plays with this ambiguity by denying the audience a clear answer to Maud’s motivations or even what reality we might be witnessing. Is she experiencing a true Blakean religious revelation or suffering from acute mental illness and/or an extreme form of apophenia? Does it even matter if we don’t know? 

2020 turned out to be an absolutely cracking year for British horror with titles such as His House and Host, but for me Saint Maud really is the icing on the blood-splattered cake. It marks the emergence of Rose Glass as an extremely talented film-maker and her recognition as Best Debut Director at the recent British Independent Film Awards (BIFA) was well-deserved. Let’s hope Saint Maud’s critical success will mark a watershed moment for women directing and writing horror films in the UK, and with Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor (2020) also just on the horizon, perhaps our saviours have come.

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