Rose Glass (2019)
The last two or three years have seen plenty of lauded horror films – the Ari Aster pair Hereditary and Midsommar, Jordan Peele’s Us, Natalie Erika James‘s Relic. Having been negative about them all, I made an effort to see the positive in this addition to the list, the debut feature of the young British writer-director Rose Glass. That kind of resolution isn’t the best approach to a film. The effort probably deserved to fail and eventually did, though Saint Maud is promising for a while. In keeping with current fashion, Glass announces her macabre intentions instantly. A prologue, accompanied by the first sounds of Adam Janota Bzowski’s discomfiting score, features the staring-into-the-camera face of a young woman wearing bloodstained medical scrubs; a corpse laid out nearby; a plump cockroach crawling down a wall; a shot of viscous, bubbling blood with the look of tomato soup on the boil. But the narrative then settles into something more obliquely unnerving.
The woman in the prologue is Maud (Morfydd Clark), next seen praying for guidance and success in her new role as a private palliative carer. Her American patient, Amanda Kohl (Jennifer Ehle), is a former ‘dancer, choreographer and minor celebrity’: Maud explains in voiceover – and, it seems, to God – she looked up her patient online, adding that she’s not keen on ‘creative types’, who ‘tend to be self-involved’. Yet the chalk-and-cheese pair hit it off. Amused by Maud’s brisk naivete and crucifix necklace, the sophisticated, wheelchair-bound Amanda is nevertheless appreciative of the quality care she’s receiving. When she first asks about the crucifix Maud closes off the conversation. When the unbelieving, terminally ill woman admits her fear of death, however, the young nurse recognises Amanda’s potential as a soul to save. This is a relief to Maud, who’s getting impatient with God (her manner of speaking to Him is direct to the point of demanding) for a sign that her professional engagement can also be a fruitful religious mission.
The settings and atmosphere – an English resort town out of season, Maud’s cell-like dwelling, Amanda’s crepuscular bedroom – may not be greatly original but they’re a serviceable context for a tale of psychological disturbance and, in due course, horror, and Glass doesn’t overstress their ominous possibilities. She also makes the mutual dependency of Maud and Amanda intriguing. Amanda needs nursing care; socially isolated Maud could use some human as well as divine company. She combines the two in telling Amanda that she sometimes feels God as a tangible presence. She’s delighted that her show of ecstasy prompts Amanda to say she feels the presence too. Amanda makes Maud a gift of Morton D Paley’s book on William Blake, complete with Ancient of Days jacket illustration and a dedication to Maud ‘my saviour’. The words are surrounded by a pair of angel wings – a humorous doodle but no joke to the dedicatee.
Maud may be a weird instrument of salvation but you feel Amanda could use deliverance from her worldly friends. Slick, ineffectual Richard (Marcus Hutton) pays her a visit, asks why Amanda’s holed up in a seaside dump when she could be living in London, and, when she collapses, has to phone Maud, who returns from solitary exile for the evening in a Wimpy bar to take charge. Another, more regular visitor to the house, Carol (Lily Frazer), proves crucial in the story. The increasingly possessive Maud finds out – or, at least, is convinced – that Amanda pays Carol for sex. Maud tells her to stop coming to the house because she’s jeopardising the fate of Amanda’s soul. Carol, though miffed, appears to comply until she reappears at Amanda’s birthday party. (The large bohemian turnout is surprising for a back-of-beyond coastal resort.) After announcing to the gathering that Maud tried to send Carol away, Amanda mocks her nurse for trying to save her spiritually. Maud retaliates by striking Amanda, and loses her job.
When Amanda dispenses with her services Maud also falls out with God, whom she characteristically ticks off for rejecting her. This, alas, is the last of her distinctive discourse with Him. After building suspenseful interest in her protagonist’s relationships with the Almighty and Amanda, Saint Maud now largely ditches both: Rose Glass has merely been paving the way for the shock events and images that dominate the second half of the film (which runs only eighty-four minutes, though they pass increasingly slowly). Morfydd Clark’s sympathetic playing compels interest in her character. Clark is especially arresting when Maud’s surface behaviour and conversation are deceptively rational – for example, when she engineers an apparently chance meeting with Ester (Rosie Sansom), Amanda’s replacement carer.
I wanted to know more of how Maud’s seemingly recent conversion had come about. Glass not only ignores that but eschews any exploration of her screwed up personality. When she first bumps into Joy (Lily Knight), who nurses at the hospital where both used to work, we learn that Maud’s real name is Katie (though I’ll stick with Maud): it’s confirmed she left following the death of a patient in her care, as luridly depicted in the film’s opening sequence. Once she’s thoroughly alone, Maud goes to a pub, where she tries and fails to latch on to other people socially. She does, though, manage to give a quick handjob to one young man (Jonathan Milshaw) before taking another man (Turlough Convery) back to her flat. While they’re having sex Maud is traumatised by flashbacks to the death of her patient and has to stop. Undaunted, the man in her bed rapes her, telling Maud he recognises her as the whore a friend of his once had sex with.
Earlier on, Maud informs Amanda that her chosen saint is Mary Magdalene and that it’s a mistake to think the New Testament describes her as a prostitute (Maud is correct on that). Her pickup’s abusive treatment and disparagement of her past hint heavily at why the Magdalene is personally meaningful to Maud – but that’s as far as Glass goes. By now, Maud is a less individual zealot than she was when chivvying God. She becomes, instead, a familiar screen religious maniac. She ratchets up the self-mortification. She levitates, or imagines herself levitating. We hear the voice of God, in the person of the crucified Christ, speaking to her (in Welsh, according to a review on the website ‘Thinking Faith’!). Maud interprets rolling clouds in the sky as a further heavenly communication.
Draped in a sheet to look vaguely Biblical and bearing rosary beads, she returns to Amanda’s house. Now close to death, Amanda asks forgiveness for having mocked her faith but when Maud reminds her of the time they shared the presence of God her former patient is demonically transformed. The voice of Satan issues (The Exorcist-style) from her as she scornfully tells Maud she was only pretending to experience God, who doesn’t exist. Maud loses it and stabs Amanda to death. In Saint Maud’s big finish, the heroine goes to the seashore, sprouts luminous angel wings, douses herself in acetone, exclaims ‘Glory to God’, self-immolates and, in her dying moments, sees horrified onlookers genuflect as she’s consumed in fire.
The above-mentioned ‘Thinking Faith’ piece describes Maud as ‘converted to a rather evangelical brand of Christianity’. Wikipedia’s plot synopsis terms the title character ‘a devout Roman Catholic’. Given Rose Glass’s approach, the differing interpretations are reasonable. Glass wants the best of both denominations – the evangelical’s hotline to God, the variously suggestive iconography of Catholicism. It’s the latter’s inherently richer visual possibilities, rather than the personality or cultural background of Maud, that determine its eventual dominance. With an ominous sound design (by Paul Davies) and images that are full-blooded in more ways than one (the cinematographer is Ben Fordesman), Saint Maud isn’t easily described as a facile film yet I think it is. In making Maud inexplicably bonkers, Glass is leaning on anti-religious prejudice. (It wasn’t until the closing credits that I picked up the name of the one-night-stand who rapes Maud: it’s Christian.) Confident that many in her audience will be primed to see life-governing piety as pathological per se, she can abandon Maud as a character (or even a case) study. Glass uses a saint manqué, rather, as a means to the end of a virtuoso horror show.
3 February 2021
