I recently watched the 2019 British psychological horror movie
Saint Maud:
Saint Maud | Official Trailer HD | A24:
Here is how
The IMDb describes this movie:
There but for the grace of God goes Maud, a reclusive young nurse whose impressionable demeanor causes her to pursue a pious path of Christian devotion after an obscure trauma.
Now charged with the hospice care of Amanda, a retired dancer ravaged by cancer, Maud’s fervent faith quickly inspires an obsessive conviction that she must save her ward’s soul from eternal damnation – whatever the cost.
Making her feature-film debut, writer/director Rose Glass cannily lures the audience into this disturbed psyche, steadily setting up her veritable diary of a country nurse for an unnerving and ultimately shocking trajectory.
Morfydd Clark (also at the Festival in The Personal History of David Copperfield) portrays the sanctimonious Maud with an intense stoicism that belies a disquieting vulnerability, as Maud desperately vies for absolution and solidarity from her embittered patient (an enthralling Jennifer Ehle, also at the Festival in Beneath the Blue Suburban Skies).
Glass tenderly captures this relationship with an empathetic gaze that first assumes an ethereal, dreamlike atmosphere–but before long, Maud’s dogmatic candor incites an irreconcilable friction that spirals her mind into a suffocating confluence of creeping doubt and paranoia.
As Glass tightens the screws on her misguided martyr, well-placed nods are made to religious horror forerunners like William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist,” further contributing to the film’s increasingly dread-filled malaise.
And when this insidious fever climatically breaks, the consequences are devastating and terrifying in equal measure.
— Toronto International Film Festival
My Thoughts
Morfydd Clark was way too good at this role, it makes you wonder, either her acting is really that good, and / or she has some real experience with some of the things that her character dealt with.
She had a standout performance, perfect casting, she was / became
Maud; well done Ms. Clark.
If you had doubts about her acting after seeing the terrible TV show
The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power, then watch this movie, and be amazed by the difference between her performance in this movie compared to that TV show.
Also, a shoutout to
Rose Glass, who should have been the director for the disappointing time-wasting 2022 movie
Skinamarink; it would have been a much better movie if she had directed it.
If you are trying to decide which of these two films to watch, watch Saint Maud, in my opinion Skinamarink was not worth watching & mostly annoyed me.
Saint Maud did lose a bit of steam at some point, but it picked up at the end.
I would probably rate this movie a 4 out of 5 or 3.5 out of 5.