SAINT MAUD | FILM REVIEW
Dir: Rose Glass (15, 83 mins)
Taut, claustrophobic and compelling, this debut feature from writer/director Rose Glass proves to be the best British horror film in years. Rising Welsh star Morfydd Clark, who was onstage in Cardiff’s Sherman Theatre a few years ago in The Cherry Orchard, is superb as Maud, a care nurse recently converted to a religious calling. Set in a grey, dead-end seaside town, she administers palliative care to wheelchair-bound ex-dancer and choreographer Amanda Kohl, an excellent Jennifer Ehle. Her patient is full of bitterness and Maud takes it upon herself to ‘save’ her patient, which Amanda initially accepts, finding her curious carer intriguing with her total devotion and apparently unswerving fervour.
Matters are thrown into disarray when their connection is disturbed by Amanda’s lover Carol, played with vivacity by Lily Frazer. Maud’s spiritual crisis is ongoing, becoming more extreme as the film deepens and darkens. There are moments that are not for the squeamish – nails in feet, flashes of gore – but this is not a jump-scare horror, it’s far more disturbing than that. Clark’s central performance is mesmerizing as writer/director Glass manages to make her extremities sympathetic and believable, whilst simultaneously making her a very questionable anti-hero. Ehle adds vinegar to the mix as the tortured and torturing Amanda who refuses to be ‘saved’ by the earnest Maud as she heads towards the grave.
Moments of poetry emerge, Glass suffusing Maud’s ongoing mental deterioration with gothic beauty alongside cinematographer Ben Fordesman, with Clark’s levitation moment a case in point. An examination of faith and loneliness as well as a deeply unsettling psychological horror, this intense character study is a gripping nightmare that gets under the skin and leaves cinematic stigmata on the soul. An intelligent Halloween chiller, worth braving a cinema for in these troubled times.
words KEIRON SELF
In cinemas now