Saint Maud review – nursing a nightmare of erotic intimacy
Last year, Morfydd Clark appeared in Armando Iannucci’s new version of David Copperfield playing both David’s mother and the woman he’s in love with – a Freudian-doppelganger performance so coolly understated that many didn’t realise it was happening, or quite why they found Clark’s appearance (s) so disquieting. Well, there’s nothing understated about her now, and what a sensational breakthrough in this extraordinary horror melodrama from first-time feature director Rose Glass. Clark gives an operatically freaky turn that knifed me in the kidneys, the way Catherine Deneuve did in Repulsion or Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves. And her final split second on screen is the equivalent of brutally pulling out the knife to start the internal bleeding.
It’s a scary movie that is also a satirical nightmare about the physical and erotic intimacy of nursing. The setting is the seaside town of Scarborough, along whose seafront and garish arcade frontages Maud is in the habit of going for moody solo walks. She is an intense and lonely young woman living in a scuzzy bedsit, employed as a private agency nurse and palliative caregiver. She prays often, asking to be delivered from incessant stomach pains.
It seems at first that Maud is a cradle Catholic, and these are the moral certainties that she has imbibed since childhood. Could it be that she has been named after Saint Maud, the 10th-century Saxon queen renowned for piety and caring for the sick? She carries round her neck an image of Mary Magdalene, which she has “ordered online”. But it is only when Maud bumps into an old nursing colleague, Joy (Lily Knight), that we realise that her persona is not exactly what it seems.