UK | 2019 | Directed by Rose Glass
Logline: A troubled, deeply religious young nurse becomes obsessed with saving the soul of her dying patient.
Hell hath no fury like … God.
Young Katy (Morfydd Clark) is trying to escape her past. But she’s not doing a very good job of it. She was a nurse at a hospital, but something terrible happened, and now she has taken a job, under the name Maud, as a private palliative carer for a woman at her home. She isn’t shy at proclaiming her Christian faith, a recent conversion. Amanda Kohl (Jennifer Ehle) was once a successful dancer and choreographer, but is now mostly bound to her bed and wheelchair due to terminal cancer. Amanda hasn’t got long, and she is determined to be entertained at any hour. She finds Maud’s piousness both curious and amusing.
It isn’t long before the audience realise just how confused and disturbed Katy/Maud is. She is a tormented soul, desperate for approval from Almighty God in Heaven, and steadily exasperated over what direction she must take in order to fulfil her purpose on earth. She sees Amanda as her path to absolution, and it is her God-given, sanctimonious right to save the woman’s poor, ruinous, sin-soaked soul. Amanda bemuses her anguished carer, even signs a book of Blake’s religious paintings proclaiming Maud, complete with sketched angel’s wings, as her saviour.
Maud’s psyche is deeply damaged, and through the woman’s unreliable perspective, the narrative twists and turns upside down, as a distraught Maud’s vision narrows to a darkened tunnel, with the flames of redemption beckoning like a scalding torch of truth. Along the way Maud is constantly testing herself, subjecting herself to a kind of flagellation, as she burns and cuts herself, picking off the scabs, even putting inner soles with tacks into her shoes so she must endure agony whilst hobbling through the tiny seaside town. She exhibits mawkishness and resilience, she’s wretched child and seething banshee coiled in the same scattered mind, the same scarred body, twitching, arching, rising from the floor …
There, but for the grace of God goes Maud. She is seemingly a pawn in a giant, cruel, and brutal chess game of faith. Whichever way she turns she sees signs telling her she is doing the right thing, doing the wrong thing, not doing anything at all, maybe doing too much? When God is inside her she feels ecstatic, possessed even, when God confronts her, even talks to her directly - in what I thought was Hebrew, but I think might actually be Welsh - she is compelled. Amanda Kohl is the vessel to her reaching sainthood, and blood will be spilled in the name of the Holy Ghost.
Writer/Director Rose Glass, with a clutch of short films to her name, has seemingly stolen the Holy Grail, heralding an instant nightmare classic. Her debut feature is a work of blistering art, dangerous and dark like the shadows of one’s crippling anxieties, yet exquisite in its restraint, its suggestiveness. She has such a beautiful command of mise-en-scene, elicits perfection from her cast, whilst the camera lens lingers with a hypnotic use of close-up, capturing the fragility of flesh and the cold indifference of acetone, a turbulent swirl of beer in a glass, a cockroach perched on the edge of a kitchen sink … Composer Adam Janota Bzowski, also on his first feature, delivers an absolutely stunning score of sinister drones and sub-sonics, etching a steadily building soundscape of pure dread.
I’m not at all religious, but I find dark fascination in the disquieting vulnerability of those, like Maud, who are so committed to a higher faith, yet rudderless and volatile. This is a kind of first cousin removed of Joker. It ramifies how curiously flawed the human race is; “humankind”, a kind of anomaly, as we’re so embroiled with power, manipulation, corruption, yet so desperately fragile and frightened, searching, clutching, searching, clutching …
Saint Maud is a masterful portrait of madness, soaked in the brine of despair, blinded by the light of redemption, shocking in its denouement. It’s very rare for me to sign off with five stars so fervently and immediately - even in the unusual circumstances that I watched the movie - but Rose Glass’s study of guilt and the tortured divine has tapped the sublime.
Saint Maud screens as part of the Fantastic Film Festival Australia, Friday, February 28th, 8.45, Lido rooftop, Melbourne, Sunday, March 1st, 9pm, The Ritz, Sydney, and Wednesday, March 4th, 6.30pm, Lido.