There are two distinctly different films packed into the eighty-three minute runtime of Saint Maud (Rose Glass, 2019). One is a suffocating psychological drama about the festering, corruptible nature of Christian faith in an isolated mind, while the other seeks only to transform its religious subject matter into a boogie-man under the bed. Despite demonstrating an impressive gift for evoking the terrors of public spaces and moulding truly superb performances from her stars, Glass falls back on the safer tropes of a more conventional horror film far too often, and the resulting amalgamation is simply too frustrating to make much of an impact.
The film follows Maud (Morfydd Clark), a recently converted Christian who works as a private nurse for clients who value their anonymity. Her latest assignment, Amanda (Jennifer Ehle) is a retired dancer and minor celebrity afflicted with a terminal spinal disease to which she could succumb at any time. Shocked by Amanda’s determination to keep up appearances and remain socially relevant in her dying days, Maud takes it upon herself to “save” Amanda from eternal damnation, going above and beyond her duties in order to purge this sickly woman of her rapidly fading past.
The relationship between these two women is the film’s most effective dynamic; Maud is as buttoned-up and God-loving as they come, but her infatuation here is so intimate as to suggest something that is, as far as Maud’s ideologies are concerned, more sinful. In an early scene, Amanda is compared to Norma Desmond of Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) fame, and that film’s interest in symbiosis between a misguided youth and a decrepit legend is more than applicable here. Despite having only recently joined the Church, Maud is oddly naive about her employer’s desire to bathe in a lifelong whirlpool of vanity and indulgence, while Amanda is overly keen to encourage her eccentric assistant, taking an insincere interest in Maud’s rituals for her own amusement. As much as the film is about clashes between faith and liberties, it is equally about an insecure girl who is destructively obsessed with stripping her more stable, but selfish elder of all comforts and compelling them to fuse with her into one ideological mind.
Clark is fantastic in the role, constantly hinting at the wildfire spreading behind Maud’s polite expressions. Evidently aware of this gift, Glass frames the film’s most memorable moments in the darkest of corners, obscuring large sections of Clark’s face and forcing her to perform with her eyes alone. She never fails to deliver, and the results amount to some of the most chilling images you’ll find in a cinema this year.
Unfortunately, the film collapses in its second half as it expands its world away from Amanda’s miserable, soul-crushing abode and out into the great beyond. The seedy bars and chilly piers of the film’s second act fail to sufficiently challenge Clark’s impeccable performance. As the cast grows bigger and bigger, Clark is given fewer opportunities to showcase her talents, instead being burdened with clunky conversations against less engaging characters who appear to exist solely to scale back the film’s intricacies. Slowly but surely, Maud’s motivations are boiled down to plain zealotry, setting the stage for a disastrously perfunctory duo of third act setpieces.
The film’s climax continues this downward trajectory, clutching the viewer’s hand tightly as it meanders through the expected beats of any second-rate horror film without any of the distressing flourishes that made its earliest scenes so unforgettable. Most bizarre of all is Glass’ decision to resort to cheap jump scares as resolutions to not one, but two consecutive confrontations in the film’s finale. These hollow thrills not only puncture the film’s surgically patient and sensual atmosphere, but they also nullify some of its most intriguing ambiguities. Indeed, the film’s final frame seems purposefully designed to ensure that nothing is left up to the imagination. In the vein of a thousand mediocre horror films before it, Saint Maud is damned by its fear of being misunderstood.
It is almost absurd how many truly mesmerising flourishes and inspired details are trapped beneath the surface of Saint Maud. The film’s interrogation of queer power dynamics in the realm of Catholicism is genuinely fascinating, and in the forty minutes this process is immaculate, but as the film makes more concessions to barebones genre filmmaking in its clunky midsection, Glass struggles to balance her area of interest with the codified beats of the horror rulebook. Saint Maud is an adequate horror movie, but it could have been so much more.
Saint Maud is released in Irish cinemas December 4.
