Saint Maud (2019) is an intense psychological horror film under the directorship of Rose Glass, the writer of this particular script as well as her debut as a film maker. The plot is anecdotal and focuses on Maud, a young nurse with a deep faith who takes care of Amanda, a dying out and non-religious dancer. Maud’s belief that she a selected person to save Amandas’s soul only fuels her religious mania tother extremes. Mzia’s focus on the religious task at hand leads a derailment in her mental state as she becomes more religious in her approach to the task of giving Amanda’s spirit peace, to me the peak between religion and madness.
For me, the most unpleasant impression from watching Saint Maud was how precisely the obsessional states, isolation, and transfigured areas between belief and pathological development are all presented. Tension when people watch the internal battles of Maud comes almost as a fever from her external temptations inducing heat. This gives way to a slow yet torturous build-up of stress, disturbing imagery, and deeply unsettling sea change of the practioner head space that matches exceptionally. Maud changed so dramatically that I began to doubt her reasons, was it god or only her mind.
One amazing thing is that Saint Maud is a debut feature film, but this did not prevent it from amazing filmgoers’ hearts, thanks to its quite bold story telling and Maud as performed by Morfydd Clark. Indeed, the originality and psychological richness of the picture allowed it to win in many reviews as one of the horror movies in recent years. However, it did not do well in terms of box office and eventually earned approximately $ 1. 4 million, partly due to limited distribution and the effects of COVID, yet gathered quite an audience.
Saint Maud impresses in terms of the fact that it does not lean on the stereotypical format of horror. Rather it explores the horrifying allure of zealotry and the delicate balance of sanity, which left such an impression on me. The film’s final moments, which are simply astounding, brings the world of genre films formed by thousands and thousands of stories of psychological horror to the verge of cosmic horror that is simply beyond all senses.