Review: SAINT MAUD

A brief scene following a medical disaster has a nurse squeezed into the corner of an operating room with blood actually on her hands. She is in numb shock and the palette is an icy blue. Then a mass of bubbling blood coloured liquid that might be the pits of hell is revealed to be tomato soup. Maud is getting ready to go to her next job as a private carer, telling us in a voiceover prayer that she is doing what she can before her god has her real job ready. She trudges through her cold British seaside town, ascending to the house of her patient Amanda, a dancer whose body has betrayed her with cancer and left her decaying if still hedonistic. The disaster at the beginning has left Maud with possibly undiagnosed PTSD and she has since got religion in the form of a severe and ascetic strain of Catholicism. So, decrepit old debaucher, meet your quiet, judgey missionary. What could go wrong is the plot of this film.

For a while things seem pretty normal, if you count strange dialogues between carer and patient about the latter's newfound religion and the latter's moments of apparent orgasmic communions when alone. Amanda has not let go of her hedonism, even at death's door and Maud feels compelled to warn Amanda's regular sex worker away from the house. Tensions grow until a moment of cataclysm (seems small at the time but it's enough) plunges Maud into an earthly hell. Fired, she retreats into her stark and small flat, praying by day and luring sexual partners by night in pubs. Then god speaks to her directly, with words, in a voice. He has a plan for her. She needs to be ready. 

It's at that point where we must confront our decision between taking what we see literally and what Maud is seeing in her mental condition. It's not an easy choice. I'm an atheist but have no problem going along with a religious narrative in a fiction if it doesn't expect me to commit to theism (so, I can feel for Fr. Karras in The Exorcist without exactly empathising with him) but depictions of religious mania need to keep a steady course this side of their own compliance with reality. Saint Maud does something else again.

While the full story of the opening scene offers us a lot of context we are still left to marvel at the extent of the change from the nurse Katie to the Maud we first see interacting with the world. Maud does not go to church for masses or confession or even prayer. She does not engage with the community that a church encourages. The state that looks a lot like medieval Catholicism has been formed by Maud herself and includes no one else, no equal under the deity. She is not Bess in Breaking the Waves but rather Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, driven through a self-scouring discipline into the belief that she alone can deliver humanity. There is another film that is probably near impossible to find called Act of the Heart that treads a similar path but cannot compete with the intensity of this film.

This severe delusion has come from trauma which has led to the pressing loneliness imposed upon the survivors of trauma. No one else can know their pain or sense of futility in attempting atonement for the tragedy in her past. Religion provides a form fitted solution to this and, as Denis Potter once put it, it's not the band-aid but the wound. Rather than providing an escape from pain, Maud's invented universe of stern gods and impossible choices simply find a use for it.

Happily, this film does not preach this but gets on with it. Rose Glass weaves a clear style with the gravity of the story in transparent fashion and her vehicle, Morfydd Clark in the title role, grabs your attention by the neck.  Maud's tale, stark and humourless, does not pause for breath and just as you think all is lost at the finish line you are shown something else. Not saying what but it works for the best and the worst.