Saint Maud

Burning Faith

Saint Maud
UK 2019 Directed by Rose Glass
Escape Plan Productions

Well, this film is absolutely amazing.

Saint Maud is the feature debut (after helming a few shorts) of the writer/director Rose Glass and, it has to be said, I’m a little worried for her. Simply because, whenever a first time director debuts with a film this perfect, you have to wonder when in their careers they are going to come up with the inevitable dud and how it will affect them. This is, frankly, an astonishing piece of art. Not least because, in some ways, it doesn’t take any prisoners when it comes to challenging the audience to bring their own baggage to the party. Indeed, the final shot of the film, which I won’t go into here because I don’t want to drop any major spoilers, doesn’t pull the rug away from the audience... or even tries to have it’s cake and eat it at the same time... it just forces you to reflect inwards on your personal interpretation of the events that take place in the movie. Or maybe it doesn’t and I’m just reading too much into it so, apologies to the director if there is supposed to be a clear stance on this movie and I just didn’t see it.

The film stars Morfydd Clark as Maud (and when I say ‘stars’, I really mean it), who is a private carer coming to look after a dying dance choreographer called Amanda, played by Jennifer Ehle. Following on from an opening sequence giving us our first look at a troubled back story for Maud, which will become more apparent as the movie progresses and flashes back to it a few times, she accepts her assignment along with her new found religious visions of a loving but testing God. And that’s where the doubt creeps in for the audience because, at first, it’s easy to take Maud’s heavily religious slant as a possible mental aberration of the character but, as the film unfolds, you’ll find the imagery the director chooses to confront the audience with quite pointed in some ways but, similarly, also quite untrustworthy in it credibility as soon as we see possible signs that Maud is in some way God’s chosen one.

And, I really won’t say anything more about the story barring that initial set up because a) I really don’t want to ruin anything about this one and b) there’s more than enough other stuff to talk about in terms of how the film has been shot and presented that I don’t have to resort to concentrating too much on the story.

Right from the opening prologue I could tell I was in good hands. The director seems to have an obsession with junctions creating central vertical lines such as... well, especially... the corners of rooms. But the other thing she does is either look down or up slightly at the content of the frame for quite a lot of the film (surely at least half the shots of the film are taken from a viewpoint slightly above or below the subject of a shot). It also pulls you into the picture even more when the shot changes to another scene and you are suddenly looking down at the character in a deeper shot, such as walking up or down a big flight of stairs in the surrounding neighbourhood. And it’s this, I believe, which is one of those things, completely subconsciously, that starts to nicely unsettle the viewer as the film unfolds.

You know how Arthur Penn deliberately withholds the establishing shots in Bonnie And Clyde so that, when you do finally see a decent one, the relief for the audience is coupled to a sense of empathy with the central outlaws of the film? Well, I believe that’s very similar to what Glass does here, where the majority of the establishing shots are at an angle so that, when the occasional shot does come from straight on in front of a subject... and they get more frequent as the film progresses so might well be, I suspect, a metaphor for Maud’s ‘spiritual journey’ as told in the choices of angles... you do get a sense of ‘finally, something which isn’t off kilter’ when they happen.

And as I say, they’re frequent at first but they’re not the only device the director uses to unsettle us. She seems to display a penchant for those corner angles and reflects them excessively in the use of geometric patterns on screen, with the wallpaper in Maud’s bedroom at the place she is working really throwing it up there from early on. This all comes to a head about ten minutes into the movie, when Maud sits in a cafe and the angular verticals of the windows seem almost overkill and really pushing the visual point... by which I mean, the shot looks exquisite and, once again, made me grin.

There’s a big ‘bam’ of a moment which starts off what I shall simply refer to as the ‘Christ’s temptation in the Judaean Desert’ sequence, where Maud falls into the darkness which is almost comical in its resemblance to Taxi Driver. You know that shot where, if memory serves because it’s been decades since I last saw it (mental note... re-watch it for this blog), Scorcese suddenly cuts to the ‘street musician’ banging on the drums to give us this jarring edit? The same thing happens here and then the scenes, filmed around areas of Scarborough which I remember from holidaying there over the years, almost takes on the browns, reds and oranges of ‘Scorcese-land’ for the rest of the sequence.  

And even when the shots are taken straight on, there is usually something just slightly off about them. For example, in a conversation between Maud and Amanda at one point, we see Maud’s head in the centre of the frame but then realise it’s just a little over to the left of the shot. After cutting to Amanda, we see she’s just a little right of the centre of the shot. From then on though, when we cut back to Maude, we see she’s framed quite a bit more to the left than earlier in the shot and this kind of pitching of elements against each other in places where the eye needs to play catch up (which is a trick I wouldn’t want to brave in a widescreen aspect ratio for fear of popping the audience out of the movie), forces the viewer to adapt to the constant visual shifts and its an uneasy alliance between viewer and film-maker. At least that’s how it felt to me.

There’s even a moment when a slab of a rectangle of an alleyway, with Maud walking down it and black screen on either side, is presented initially as a horizontal strip within the shot before we see it, very slowly, turn 10 or so degrees anti-clockwise within the frame. The director is really making  our minds work throughout this movie and, frankly, I was pleased to have the exercise.

Added to this, the director uses deliberately arresting imagery which almost teases the audience. So a close up on a bubbling bowl of soup recalls the bloody incident as yet fully unrevealed at the start of the picture (and it’s a shot which comes in the first minute or two as a segue into a time shift). Similarly, the angle of a head on a gurney, the long hair hanging down to the ground and dripping with blood, is beautifully echoing the angle of Amanda’s head and hanging hair in one of her old dance routines, even used as a poster to promote one of her shows. These nice visual echoes occur throughout and, even if this thing had no story, I’d still call it the best new film I’ve seen in the last 12 months because the imagery is so rich in terms of the design and placement of objects against the environment within each scene.

And, all those visuals are complemented by some good sound design and an absolutely blisteringly great score by Adam Janota Bzowski which, alas, is not available on a proper CD. So, you know, I won’t get to listen to it away from the movie, which is a shame (hey film companies... don’t try and foist your lousy vinyl and digitally lacking downloads at me, we need this released in a real format please).

The music just adds to the way the director builds tension by pitching our expectations of the character of Maud against the powder keg we know she can become. This makes for some very suspenseful scenes and you will possibly, like me, be fearing for the lives of some of the other people in the movie because you really can’t always keep track of where Maud is, mentally (although the settling down of the visual design should maybe help at certain points). Of course, some of that credit is due to the sheer brilliance of the performance of the central character. When I first started watching Morfydd playing Maud as the repressive, disciple of God she presents herself to us as, I thought to myself, “Yeah, quite a good actress... she’s doing a good job here.” However, when you see her become a normal, screwed up person during her ‘last temptation’ sequence, the one I mentioned earlier, you realise just how brilliant an actress she really is playing this part. If somebody this year deserves some kind of award for acting (and regular readers will know I really hate awards so don’t take this stuff lightly), then Morfydd Clark wholeheartedly deserves to get one. This is an amazing performance.

But then again, Saint Maud is an amazing film and Rose Glass deserves a huge round of applause for this and, yeah, I really want to know where she is going to go next with her art. This is a film I will certainly be visiting again over the years. I can’t really class it as a horror film (although some people will definitely go there with their genre classifications) because I’m just not sure that the ‘Maud’s eye view’ of the reality of the situation in certain scenes is necessarily the real story and, like I said, the very last shot of the film compounds that uncertainty to an extent. Frankly, though, I don’t care what genre people want to stick the film into... it’s enough for me that it’s plain brilliant. If you’re into the art of cinema, then this is truly one you won’t want to miss.