Saint Maud is one of a kind. Writer-director Rose Glass’ debut is brazenly unclassifiable, supremely comfortable in its own uncomfortable skin. In its tight 83 minutes, it blurs both psychological and body horror with the kind of religious ascetism you might find in a Paul Schrader flick to create a mood and feel all of its own. It’s a tough, rigorous watch — it makes Robert Bresson look like Pixar — but announces Glass, a graduate of the National Film & Television School, as a brave new voice, unafraid to tackle the biggest questions in ambitious moviemaking strokes.
At its heart, Saint Maud is a character study of a young woman going through a breakdown via the fervour of her religious calling. Diffident, recently converted Maud (Morfydd Clark) is a palliative-care nurse in the kind of dreary seaside town Morrissey bangs on about (it was shot in Scarborough and fits perfectly into the fabulously British cinema sub-genre of dead-end lives in small coastal towns — see Brighton Rock, Wish You Were Here, Make Up). “Never waste your pain” is the slogan Maud lives her life by, her backstory hinted at in a grisly, foreboding but purposefully vague prologue that we never get to the bottom of — just know that everything subsequently has become parlayed into God’s plan. Having left the NHS, she arrives at the cavernous, rundown house of embittered ex-dancer Amanda Köhl (Jennifer Ehle), dying from end-stage lymphoma. Maud decides it is her calling to save Amanda, who she sees as lost, and Amanda initially gives in to Maud’s blind devotion — it’s a portrait of loneliness inhabiting two women at very different points in their lives. There are external conflicts — Maud becomes hostile towards Amanda’s lover, Carol (a vivacious Lily Frazer), who threatens the pair’s bond — but mostly this is about Maud’s internal meltdown, a divine struggle Glass makes extremely cinematic.
Morfydd Clark is a revelation in her first lead, at once vulnerable yet powerful and chilling.
For, as with Taxi Driver and Travis Bickle, Glass pulls off the nifty trick of being objective and subjective at the same time. She puts us completely inside Maud’s warped worldview, yet also stands outside of it, examining it with scalpel-like precision. There are jump scares and moments not for the squeamish — nails/feet interface — but this is mostly horror in a restrained register, treading a thin line between Expressionism and realism to convey Maud’s disintegrating psychological state. Paulina Rzeszowska’s production design and Ben Fordesman’s cinematography chime perfectly together, etching an ominous low-light, frayed-around-the-edges, almost timeless world (it could be the ’60s) that perfectly reflects Maud’s inner state — few recent debuts have mined the relationship between a character’s headspace and physical space so adroitly and unnervingly. Yet for all its sense of unease, it is a compassionate film. You think it is going to turn into a Misery-type deal but Glass doesn’t treat Maud like a monster; instead she presents a thoughtful and sympathetic depiction of a troubled soul — spiritual-crisis movies are rarely this affecting.
Glass is well served by her players. Jennifer Ehle has never been better. She forms Amanda’s piercing intelligence and sense of a fading hedonist, facing her decline with black humour and an acid tongue. “You must be the loneliest girl I’ve ever seen,” she tells Maud, and there is the sense Amanda’s young care worker is just a rag doll to toy with until the next thrill. Amanda has no desire to be saved, and Ehle plays it beautifully.
After supporting turns in Love & Friendship, Patrick Melrose and this month’s Eternal Beauty, Clark is a revelation in her first lead, at once vulnerable yet powerful and chilling. Her scenes with Ehle feel like a perfectly calibrated chamber piece, while an encounter with an old work colleague (Lily Knight) gives us a telling window into what she was like before, Clark also giving us ways into her character’s inner life when she’s in the frame on her own. It’s a performance that shares DNA with Samantha Morton in Morvern Callar and Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion: bold, uncompromising and vivid. As the film enters its final stages, it goes for something more overtly poetic that feels out of place with the previous restraint. But at the very least, Glass goes for broke. And in the horror genre, which often cleaves to the formulaic, such ambition and audacity should be shouted from the rooftops.
