Staging the Body: Saint Maud
Rose Glass’s Saint Maud is a raconteur for the decade-spanning, ever-popular feminisation of body-horror. The film sees a young self-effacing nurse, Maud, arrive at the sepulchral home of Amanda, a terminally ill dancer. Precisely through its Persona-inspired dynamic of an ill performer and her palliative nurse, audiences are initially tempted to glean a sense of compatibility from the two women and their close arrangement - or even to expect a fluidity between their identities - only to be harshly contradicted by the remoteness of Maud’s subjectivity.
Despite clearly referencing antecedent horror that sees women as victims to religious, patriarchal violence, such as Rosemary’s Baby, the dwindling sanity of Maud is not influenced by abusive men. It is in conjunction with her patient, Amanda; a free-spirited lesbian who, notwithstanding her sickness, sustains a lifestyle of sexual freedom and hedonism. Amanda’s physical decline is contextualised through realism; her decay is no token of horror, but an uncontrollable circumstance of her illness. In contrast, Maud attests her religious commitment by sacrificing her body, and therein, bizarrely, asserts control over her own ontology.
Captured exquisitely by Morfydd Clark, Maud’s unfettered determination is balanced with vulnerability. At once enticed and traumatised by her self-inflicted violence, Maud appears to represent the genre’s own predilection to enchant and repulse audiences in simultaneity. Explored through the confessional narration to which much of the film’s subjectivity is owed, Maud appears to be in control of her galvanising obsession, her determination to leave behind this earthly realm.
In Saint Maud, autonomy is deconstructed. Maud is riddled with guilt for an incident never thoroughly addressed, and in order to subsidise the intrusivity of this trauma, Maud channels its vigour into a fervency for God. Whether to the score of possession or internalised madness - we are never quite certain which - Maud is compelled to commit violent acts against those around her.
The genre of body-horror raises questions of agency; it often sees women pay the price for their existence, fated to trauma and eventually death. It is difficult to claim a woman possessed bears a straightforward sense of control - cinematically at least, the trope of the flailing, vomiting woman has long evidenced this. With the nuance of Maud’s psyche difficult to navigate, her autonomy is most potently conceptualised through the film's aesthetics.
Certainly owed to the women-led production of the film, Saint Maud is an utterly embodied mythology. Its transgression resides in the grooves of Maud’s skin, in her carnality. Indeed, Maud’s inhabitance of space becomes the film's thematic framework. Enacted in the dim, embryonic crevices of Amanda’s residence, upon our arrival to Maud’s own lower-ground apartment, decorated with an omnipresence of crosses, we witness the materialisation of her zealotry. From this metaphoric Dantean ‘inner circle’ emerges her deepest impulses. Nourished by this sense of volatility, Maud begins to levitate; her divine transcendence is almost complete.
Saint Maud, directed by Rose Glass
One can derive meaningful commentary on the film’s traffic between sickness and obsession. Amanda, who believes in nothing at all, embodies an existential assertion that threatens Maud. As aptly pointed out by Kelli Weston for MUBI Notebook; “Amanda is at home in her body even as it fails her, while young Maud wants nothing more than to transcend hers”. In the eyes of Maud, Amanda’s eroding body becomes an exoskeleton, a shell that separates the body from that which she desires to protect: the soul. Maud confesses to the Lord; “It’s nothing to mop up after the dead and dying. But to save a soul? That’s quite something.” The initially playful relationship between Amanda and Maud, (Amanda refers to Maud as her “little saviour”), eventually sours, as reflected in the ever-darkening gothic milieu of shadowy corridors and staircases. Indeed, adjacent to the women's deteriorating bond, the film’s aesthetic begins to claustrophobically close in on itself, eclipsing any semblance of relatability shared by the women.
Cries and Whispers, directed by Ingmar Bergman
Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman undoubtedly influences the aesthetics of Glass’s film. Saint Maud is an acerbic, feminised reconfiguration of ideas immortalised in Bergman’s Persona and Cries and Whispers, the latter of which sees a young woman dying of cancer in a mise-en-scène soaked in menstrual red. Thematically, Saint Maud is at home in modern women-led horror, such as Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, Julia Ducournau’s Raw, and recently Natalie James’ Relic - all of which assimilate an embodied, feminised sensibility to the architecture of horror.
Boasting a slow-burning, malevolent consecration of style over substance, Saint Maud relies on its wall of atmosphere, this opacity which, (despite the criticism this has excited), is precisely that which confers the unearthly powers of Glass’s direction.