Saint Maud

Jennifer Ehle and Morfydd Clark in Saint Maud

Saint Maud is an assured and discordant debut from writer-director Rose Glass. Maud is a private nurse for Amanda, a dancer and choreographer dying of cancer. Maud has recently undergone a spiritual conversion and is eager to share the love of Christ with Amanda. Amanda has no truck with religion and seems intent on living it up before her demise. The pull and tug between mistress and servant makes up the core of the picture. Morfydd Clark as Maud is not as accomplished a performer as Jennifer Ehle, who fully embodies Amanda, but Glass balances her compositions and knows when to cut away from the younger actress.

The introduction of William Blake into the story highlights its spiritual themes and no one more than Blake, in Western thought, has illustrated the interrelationship of good and evil. Maud, despite her best intentions, functions as a succubus who hastens Amanda's end. Despite her piety, she is a bringer of death. Because Glass choses to make the proceedings ambiguous, there is no clear-cut resolution of the film's spiritual issues. Similarly, the trauma of Maud's past life, when she went by the name of Katie, is not divulged to the viewer until the final reel by which time the revelation is no such thing.

Still, I doubt Ms. Glass had a cathartic ending or a tidy moral in mind when she created Saint Maud. Though promoted as a horror film, the film is really a psychological portrait of a young woman descending into madness. The horror is solely in the woman's mind, as in Polanski's Repulsion. The whirling vortexes Maud sees exist only inside her head, but convince her that she grasps the Architecture of the Divine in a grain of sand or a glass of beer.

The result of all this would be negligible if Glass didn't ground her tale so well within the tatty seaside burg of Scarborough, UK. Maud gets a glimpse, literally through an ajar door, of the life of the smart set during her time with Amanda, but is estranged from Amanda by her religious fervor and blue collar origins. Maud is struggling to survive in a moribund resort town. However, her mind is not focused on material consumption, but spiritual absolution. Saint Maud honors the ambivalence of religious ecstasy, a subjective state, clashing with the objectivity of corporeal reality.