I guess it’s a new tradition for the rubric to end on something “nun themed”, but we’re doing something a bit more recent this time too, with 2019’s Saint Maud.
Again, like i said in the Possessor review, it might feel like a lifetime ago due to the pandemic, but yes, 2019 is recent in my book, and i wanted to check this out in cinemas (even more as it got really good critical reception) but it never came out here, so i imported a UK Bluray and we’re finally getting to it now.
The premise sees a nurse named Katie fail to save the life of a patient in her care, which prompts her to quit, only to return sometime later, calling herself Maud, as a devout Catholic working again as anurse, for a private paliative care in an English seaside town.
One day she gets tasked to care for Amanda, a hedonistic dancer who’s got a terminal stage four case of lymphoma (as in: cancer), who starts fearing for the black nothing awaiting her after death, making Maud believe that God has tasked her to comfort and convert an atheist’s soul, becoming obsessed with saving her from damnation, at all costs..
Things get more complicated as Amanda is also in non-hetero relationships, among others thing i won’t spoil because then i might as well write the entire plot down as is.
Its themes of religious comfort, sexual repression, guilt, unhinged zealotry and hypocrisy are “obvious” as they are strong and serve to shape “Maud” as a martyr of her own deranged little mono-cult that she drapes over herself in order to redeem her failures of the past and coat them in holy righteousness, leading her one woman-crusade against the windmills of Jerusalem.
One mostly made to try and construct her profound loneliness and personal beliefs as a part of a grander scheme, part of a bigger design that she simply adhers to, dejecting any personal responsibilities as just a “test of faith” on the road to redemption, while staring in her own soul abyss, envious of a dying woman that has lived big and still enjoys the earthly delights she will soon depart from.
So it’s not so much a critique of cults or organized religion (though its far from being positive about the argument, at all), but in how it can be perverted even on an individual plane as a response to profound problems of feeling alone and lost in an increasingly uncaring world.
I seriously didn’t mean to repeat myself in similar fashion to the Possessor review, it just happens this is also the film debut for the director-writer Rose Glass, and it’s also a terrific debut as well, even more since there’s no influental decades old body of work from a parent figure to work off, and with an excellent English-Welsh-Irish cast delivering great performances, the stand out one being Morfydd Clark as “Maud” herself, years before she acted as Galadriel in the Lords Of The Rings tv series, The Rings Of Power.
Curiosly it’s also referred to as “body horror” adjacent despite that not being the case, Saint Maud has very little gore and physical violence (though there are scenes of Catholic self-punishment like kneeling on beads, etc), it’s mostly a creepy, very creepy and unsetting psychological horror, beautifully shot too, and definitely one to check out anyway you can if you ever slightly interested in horror cinema, especially since it’s also under 90 minutes and exactly as long as it needs to.
Great stuff.
Wise Cafe (International) 