The steady, screw-tightening accumulation of crises making up “Saint Maud” indicate a fully formed talent behind the camera. Writer-director Rose Glass’s debut feature, airing at 8 p.m. ET Friday on Epix and now available to stream, keeps its focus tight on two wonderful actors and on a compact story of nothing less than the marriage of heaven and hell, as William Blake (a key reference point in the movie) once put it.
Maud, played by Morfydd Clark, works as a nurse. Scary, murky flashes of a prologue suggest she left her previous place of employment with a bit of bad blood behind her. The story proper begins with her arrival at her new job: She’s to be the new home health-care nurse for Amanda, a chain-smoking, hard-drinking dancer/choreographer — in voiceover, Maud refers to her as a “minor celebrity,” stuck in an English seaside town — played by Jennifer Ehle.
Other characters pop in and out of these women’s lives, but “Saint Maud” doesn’t need much of them to fill its roughly 80 minutes. “Roughly” is the word, all right. While the terrors are largely psychological, with Glass sustaining a fantasy/reality limbo throughout, Maud’s spiritual journey brings a load of physical suffering along with it.
The performances are just about perfect. Ehle has long been one of the great, relatively unsung contemporary talents we have, both on stage and on screens. Her work here delineates a character described as “dangerously Norma Desmond” in Amanda’s hermetic shut-in diva routine. Ehle doesn’t shy away from that angle, but the quieter interactions and power struggles with Maud make the movie more than a premise or an idea. If it’s something less than a classic, “Saint Maud” is nonetheless a distinctive and clammy achievement.
As writer-director Glass reveals where Maud has been in her recent life, and why she has found God in this way, the story becomes a different sort of horror film. Some will appreciate that shift more than others, but there’s no quibbling with the film’s visual assurance and design wiles. Glass’s compositions frame Maud in rooms, or corners of rooms, so that the (sad) wallpaper and the Christian iconography tell their own stories. (All hail production designer Paulina Rzeszowska.)
When Maud speaks to God, in voiceover, she’s often brought to the brink of sexual ecstasy, or spiritual possession, or an unruly amalgam of the two. Clark, who never externalizes an emotion or a line reading better off held in check, makes Maud a riveting, searching vessel. She and Ehle, fearless and precise, make the relationship at the film’s center an unstable energy source, and that instability — as well as the intimacy — makes up for the script’s occasional thinness. (I wanted a slightly longer cut, I suppose.)
When things get brutal in “Saint Maud,” it’s not at all in the same way things got brutal in a female-centered horror thriller such as Ari Aster’s “Hereditary.” Hideously effective as that film was, there was a cheap-shot quality to how far Aster took the most grueling audience punishment. Is it a matter of who’s behind the typewriter and the camera? Of course it is. Beyond that, generalizations are worthless: Two of my favorite horror/thriller pictures of recent years, Jennifer Kent’s “The Babadook” and Julia Ducournau’s “Raw,” put their protagonists through serious emotional and physical hell. But the stories work from the female lead’s perspective, and it doesn’t feel like guesswork.
In “Saint Maud,” the caregiver from heaven, hell or parts unknown reads a book on William Blake. She notes in voiceover that Blake’s view of organized religion was of “an ugly distortion of a true spiritual life.” Glass’s film dramatizes, eerily and well, what Blake was talking about. The filmmaker is on her way, wherever that is.
‘SAINT MAUD’
3 stars (out of 4)
MPAA rating: R (for disturbing and violent content, sexual content and language)
Running time: 1 hour, 24 minutes
Playing: Premieres 8 p.m. ET Friday on Epix channel and now available to stream; also out in theaters, where COVID restrictions allow.
