The story of a leap of faith that leads into a vortex of unreason may well be the history of religion, which is why movies about the proximity of piety to fanaticism and fanaticism to madness have a venerable grip on the imagination. The latest entry in the genre, “Saint Maud,” the first feature by the British filmmaker Rose Glass, borrows its tropes and its terrors to conjure a handful of bold images. But its effortful attempts to craft and sustain an ominous mood comes at the expense of observation, which is too bad, because the film’s premise is powerful and its lead actors are formidable.
Morfydd Clark plays a nurse named Maud who lives and works in the seaside town of Scarborough. Formerly known as Katie, she changed her name when she changed careers, leaving a job at a hospital after a mishap resulting in a patient’s death, for work as a live-in palliative-care nurse. Maud’s patient, Amanda Köhl (Jennifer Ehle), is a formerly famous dancer who’s now dying of cancer and is facing her death fearfully. Maud’s presence turns out to bring her an unanticipated benefit: Maud is a devout Christian (a recent convert, she tells Amanda), and when she speaks of her faith in the afterlife and her sense of God’s presence, Amanda takes it as a consolation.
But Maud’s new faith is a jealous one—she seeks not only to console but to convert, and what Amanda’s conversion would entail is a renunciation of a way of life that Maud considers sinful. Amanda has hired a sex worker named Carol (Lily Frazer) to visit her, sometimes to spend the night, and Carol has become a regular member of the household; Maud does her best to pry them apart and keep Carol away, and the effort—which appears as motivated by selfish exclusivity as by religious dictate—instead turns Amanda against Maud, who gets fired. Alone and increasingly obsessed with the figure of Christ on the cross, Maud attempts mortifications of her own—sexual ones, with male strangers, and violent forms of self-scourging. Her faith unsatisfied, her principled rage unslaked, her desires unacknowledged, she turns vengeful and ever more violent, toward others and toward herself.
The problem with “Saint Maud” is that it’s a horror movie. Not that there’s a label on the film marking it as such, but the proceedings suggest a fealty to some of the genre’s more unfortunate conventions, starting with long-drone ominous music to conjure a sense of foreboding whenever what takes place onscreen doesn’t do so strongly enough. The more significant habits of genre, though, are the very ones that get in the way of the drama itself: the creation of effects without causes, the stoking of particular feelings with little practical substance or psychological insight to develop them. Glass conjures Maud’s states of mind, in touches of dialogue and haunting voice-overs, with resonant phrases that only await a dramatic unfolding, and in moments of action that simply need more detail in order to land with great weight. Instead, Maud moves through what feels like a series of cinema-stations, like a guard on night watch punching a watch clock, with none of the in-between actions registering. The burden and sublimity of faith—of Christian faith—that Maud bears is emblematized rather than explored, asserted rather than experienced.
The film’s strength is its conceptual power, which is apparent in an early scene in which Maud speaks to Amanda of God and faith. “You hear His voice?” Amanda asks, and Maud’s response is an entire movie on an index card: “Most of the time, it’s just like He’s physically in me or around me. It’s how He guides me. Like, when He’s pleased, it’s like a shiver, or sometimes it’s like a pulsing, and it’s all warm and good. He’s just there.” (The erotic implications remind me of the riff in Nietzsche’s “The Gay Science”—“‘Is it true that God is present everywhere?’ a little girl asked her mother; ‘I think that’s indecent.’ ”) Maud’s wall at home is a shrine to Jesus, filled with crucifixes and depictions of Him on the Cross, and the movie hints (but only hints) at Maud’s conflicted blend of chaste piety and stifled eroticism when mortifying her flesh, as when she kneels on coffee beans before a crucifix while offering her thanks to God.
Maud gasps as if erotically when her hand and Amanda’s hand touch; she reproaches Carol for distracting Amanda from the matters of “life and death,” from the “spiritual on another level.” The movie drops little teasers that say too little or too much, that set up a web of associations that the movie never unfolds in action or even in thought. Maud suffers from stomach pains; she has scars on her stomach; she has fainting spells. But all remain merely allusive. Maud’s interior monologue crops up on the soundtrack to give voice to her religious feelings, but it remains sharply limited, converting feelings into plot points rather than giving free play to her memories and imaginings, her longings and pleasures and losses, which mingle with her Christian devotion. The story moves relentlessly ahead, never looking to the side, as if afraid to risk breaking the anticipatory mood of shock and fear.
As the action advances, Maud’s delusions and solipsistic imaginings grow wilder, and her schemes become more dangerous, while her daily life becomes increasingly harsh and narrow. Her tiny one-room basement apartment gets more and more chaotic and filthy, until she has the “revelation” to clean it. Her random sexual encounters happen very quickly, with the stereotypical cut from a quick bar encounter to a pneumatic pumping in bed. The horrors that she inflicts on herself and on others involve and imply an element of process—it takes thought and effort to get hold of needed materials, labor to assemble devices, care to treat wounds—but the movie leaves such revelatory and weighty simplicities out. In the religious realm, the delusional can merge with the sublime, and “Saint Maud” evokes that paradox in the widening gap between Maud’s reflections and her surroundings. The movie rises to a fine frenzy of practical madness, and Glass makes much—briefly, but memorably—of the contrast between the real and the imagined. Yet the inattention to the details of Maud’s surroundings, the processes behind her acts of fury, suggest an incuriosity that’s, unfortunately, common in the current cinema. Intentions take precedence over implications; scenes take the place of possibilities, and what’s sacrificed to the knowingness of craft is the sense of discovery, surprise, and devoted observation through which character and psychology are embodied. In providing the jolts that Maud’s terrifying actions and fantasies provoke rather than the taut and complex web of life that they wrench apart, the movie suggests less interest in Maud than in images of Maud which, as a result, feel nearly empty.
