Mark Reviews Movies: SAINT MAUD

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 28, 2021

One wonders what and who Maud (Morfydd Clark) would and could have been, if not for the tragedy that has come to define her life. We learn little about the Maud of the past. She was a nurse at a hospital and a bit of a regular partier, going out to bars and having something of a free-wheeling social life. Something changed, though, and it's the moment that opens Saint Maud. We see our protagonist in a dim and dank hospital room. Her hands are covered in a blood. A body lies on a bed. Maud looks up and sees a cockroach scurrying across the ceiling. That's when everything changed.

Writer/director Rose Glass' debut feature follows this newly changed Maud, whose name wasn't always that, just as her life wasn't always this. She's still a nurse, although now one working for a private firm specializing in hospice care. She is now "Maud," instead of the name she previously had. She lives alone in a tiny apartment and only, as far as we can tell, goes out for work and shopping. She's also devoutly religious now, saying regular prayers, which come across more as one-sided conversations or diary entries, and decorating a wall dedicated to Christian paraphernalia.

There's something missing from this story, though. It's difficult to tell if we learn too much about Maud's past or not nearly enough. The argument that there's too much here consists of the idea that we become focused on the character's change, from the woman we didn't know to the one with whom we spend the entirety of this story. Her gradual descent into fanaticism, then, becomes attached to a person of whom and events of which we know little. That brings us to the case that there's too little about the woman Maud once was, because Glass seems to be pointing us toward some answer about Maud—who she is and what she eventually does—that never arrives.

When this story is simply about Maud and not about who she was prior to the events of the movie, Glass displays real skill at creating an isolated, unsettling sense of mental decay. It's especially effective and frightening because we're watching events unfold from Maud's perspective.

She sees and experiences things that cannot be real, unless the entire structure of the world is something completely different from what we can actually see and experience. Maud has moments of spiritual awakening, imagining herself levitating in the air and hearing the literal voice of a divine entity, and religious ecstasy, as if some divine presence is warming her soul with every step she takes. Intrinsically, we know all of this is false (The movie's final shot is a horrifying shock back to reality). If Maud believes it, as she does with every fiber of her being, what does what we know actually matter, though?

At first, the story, picking up some unknown time after the prologue in the bloody hospital room, focuses on Maud's newest client: a semi-famous dancer/choreographer named Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), who is dying of cancer. Maud cares for and lives with Amanda, who refuses to give up on any of her old habits—drinking to excess, chain-smoking, holding parties, having over gentleman and lady callers—in spite of or because of her impending death.

Amanda catches Maud praying once, and a simple inquiry about the young woman's faith brings on a whole slew of trouble. Maud believes that Amanda can find religion and some ultimate salvation in her final months, weeks, or days. A clearly teasing Amanda—although Maud doesn't or can't notice the joke—indulges the nurse's spiritual scheme.

With this in place, Glass gives us a kind of wickedly playful back-and-forth, between Maud's genuine sense of faith and Amanda's toying approximation of it (Ehle's performance, moving from apparent warmth to bringing about cold and calculated humiliation, brings us a semi-villain, who's tricky in that she's still sympathetic). The game doesn't last long, though, and Glass shifts the focus of the narrative to Maud, now lost in a purposeless life and haunted by who she was and what happened before her religious transformation.

Undoubtedly, the movie gains a more significant focus on the character's turmoil during this section. Without much significant information about Maud or the woman she was before her change, though, there simply isn't that much upon which to focus.

We see her try to return to her old lifestyle, prompted by a quick reunion with a former co-worker (played by Lily Knight) who politely offers to have a drink with her to catch up, and through that, the revelation of what happened in that hospital room emerges. It's a chilling image, for sure (especially in the way it's juxtaposed with a scene of attempted physical passion, although that scene raises an entirely different issue that's never addressed). It's also, in light of the extremes to which this material ultimately goes, more than a bit anticlimactic.

In the end, this character feels more like a gimmick, manufactured around a broad idea (religious fanaticism desperately searching for a sense of purpose) and the eventual violence, than a recognizable, comprehensible person (despite Clark's eerie performance, a combination of sweet naïveté and mounting ire). Glass' creation of an atmosphere of all-consuming loneliness and anguish is admirable, but Saint Maud never quite digs beneath its unnerving surfaces.

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