With Bond gone, is this the saviour of British cinema?
Saint Maud 15 cert, 84 min
Dir Rose Glass
Starring Morfydd Clark, Jennifer Ehle, Lily Frazer, Lily Knight, Turlough Convery, Rosie Sansom
Now that James Bond has skedaddled with his Walther PPK between his legs, British cinema is in the market for a saviour. Enter a frosty young palliative care nurse with a festering messiah complex, and the kind of glare that could send Covid itself scuttling off behind the fridge. Saint Maud is playing on more than 300 screens from today: a brassy roll-out for a debut feature to be sure, but even away from the current cinematic drought, writer-director Rose Glass’s skin-prickling creation would more than justify the hubbub.
It’s a fiendish psychological horror set in present-day Scarborough, if you please, where Maud (Morfydd Clark) has just been assigned a new patient. A brief prologue tips us off that Maud’s early career was blighted by some unspecified grisly trauma, after which she found religion – or rather a supremely creepy spin on it, in which “God” occasionally visits her in private moments and assails her with waves of sensation that cause her to drop to the floor and ecstatically convulse. Her agency, who are blissfully unaware of all this, dispatch Maud to a mouldering mansion on the cliffs above the town in which resides Amanda Köhl (Jennifer Ehle), a former dancer whose ongoing battle with cancer hasn’t quashed her libertine streak.
“You’re getting dangerously Norma Desmond,” one of Amanda’s old friends (Marcus Hutton) chides – and, slumped regally on the couch in her headscarf and dressing gown, she certainly looks the Sunset Boulevard part. Maud, however, is not the parasitic William Holden type: while she’s partly bewitched by this older woman, she also quickly comes to regard her as a soul to be urgently saved.
From what, though? It turns out to be more a question of whom: she’s Carol (Lily Frazer), Amanda’s vivacious young female “companion”, who comes to visit most evenings and occasionally shoots Maud a smirk while swanning past her to retrieve another bottle of champagne from the fridge. Maud’s obsession curdles into resentment, which in turn triggers a spiralling descent into full-blown fire-and-brimstone psychosis. Amanda initially attempts to smooth things over with a book of demonic William Blake paintings, which in this case is a bit like trying to patch things up with an arsonist by giving them a monogrammed Zippo.
With tingly overtones of Lynne Ramsay, Roman Polanski and Lars von Trier, Saint Maud is a film to be approached with caution – and also pure cinephile zeal. Glass is less interested in pinning down her anti-heroine as either a prophetess or fantasist than cornering her audience with the possibility that either one could be the case, even as we watch events unfold exclusively from Maud’s unswervingly devout perspective.
Those aforementioned rapturous visitations look genuine enough. In one extraordinary scene, Maud is struck down while climbing the staircase in Amanda’s house, and it’s as if the floral tendrils on the faded Arts and Crafts wallpaper are writhing in sympathy. In another, she arches backwards and starts to levitate while a (possibly New Year’s Eve) fireworks display booms and crackles outside – a moment of impregnable cinematic terror and strangeness. Even Scarborough itself feels a touch other-worldly, from the churning overcast skies to the winking lights of the seafront amusements, which take on a groggy, hallucinatory pall.
Is it horror? It’s certainly often horrific, and viewers should brace themselves for both implied and explicit gore, a jump-scare for the ages, and a brief but unforgettable final shot that could justly be described as retina-scorching. Yet Glass isn’t really adhering to or even toying with genre conventions here: much like Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse back in February, Saint Maud ploughs its own distinctive furrow in every shot, and if that happens to be suspenseful or scary, well, so be it.
Glass could hardly have asked for two more game accomplices than Clark and Ehle, who play the youknow-where out of their respective roles, and are both naturally attuned to the film’s murkily sensual, dread-laden wavelength.
In what has turned into a banner year for British film – during a pandemic, too; you have to love the timing – Saint Maud heralds the arrival of a thrillingly distinctive new voice. Even as cinemas themselves fall dark, it’s enough to rejuvenate your faith.
In cinemas from today