SHORT TAKE
SAINT MAUD
Director: Rose Glass
Country/Distributor: UK, A24
Opening: March 27
Though the Catholics would prefer it under wraps, there remains a hazy division between madness and piety in the lives of the saints. Rose Glass’s debut feature exacerbates that tension by depicting a woman in a seaside village whose moral courage seems no different from that of Joan of Arc, and whose zealous determination has disastrous consequences. Glass taps into the imagery and fanaticism at play in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, sometimes suffocatingly framing her protagonist Maud (Morfydd Clark), and other times depicting her as Christlike in the sullen brown shadows of an old mansion. There is always a sense of incense burning somewhere just out of view.
