horror movie
With Saint Maud, writer/director Rose Glass has made one of the most extraordinary horror debuts – or debuts, period – in years.
Set in an English seaside town that oozes sadness and faded glamour, it sees a young carer, Maud (Morfydd Clark), begin a new assignment looking after Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a once-famous American dancer who’s now dying of cancer in a hillside manor. Smoking, drinking, throwing parties, Amanda is raging against the encroaching darkness. Maud, whose faith protects her from past trauma, views it as part of her job to save her patient’s soul.
“I was thinking of Repulsion vibes, because I love how that movie is so contained yet so imaginatively epic,” says Glass, whose own film is likewise set, largely, in a single location – Amanda’s old dark house is not so very different from the castles in Universal and Hammer monster movies – and bleeds reality into fantasy as the sanity of a lonely woman begins to splinter. “We’re not just seeing things literally,” points out Glass. “We are experiencing Maud’s sensory emotions.”
is character study, psychosexual drama, trippy horror, religious enquiry and though it equally evokes Ingmar Bergman’s Robert Aldrich’s and Michael Powell’s Most impressive of all, though, is that it wears its influences lightly. This is a fresh, dazzling, work from a bold new voice.
