Rose Glass
Saint Maud

Saint Maud is the latest horror from A24, the American distribution company now famous for being associated with films like Midsommar, Hereditary, The Lighthouse, which have contributed to changing the aesthetic of contemporary horror and pushing it toward higher circuits than traditional ones.

Saint Maud, written and directed by Rose Glass, an English director making her feature debut, tells the story of the eponymous Maud, a girl who works as a home nurse and has a dream, or rather an obsession: to become a saint. Recently converted to Catholicism, Maud exhibits all the signs of that obsessive and heightened faith typical of neophytes or members of religious sects, which from the beginning does not bode well. When she is assigned to the care of Amanda, a former dancer and choreographer now terminally ill with cancer, after getting to know the woman, who if not an atheist is certainly not a fervent believer, she decides that the mission God has entrusted to her is to save her patient's soul before her passing, and therefore to engage in a work of conversion.

Maud's mission has little to do with Christian charity; the girl's interest in Amanda's soul's salvation is minimal, being more concerned with completing the mission to prove to God that she is worthy of his trust and that he can entrust her with more significant tasks than caring for the elderly and the sick. Indeed, Maud, in her exaltation, is convinced that God has great plans for her and is just waiting for the moment he decides to share them with her. In the meantime, however, Maud is hopeful, because she feels God's presence in her own body: in moments of mystical ecstasy, she feels a vibration coursing through her, as if he were inside her (a not-so-veiled sexual metaphor), until her body surrenders completely to him. If God isn't there, it's Maud who seeks him out, through acts of masochism, like burns, cuts, and wounds she inflicts on her skin.

Amanda seems to indulge her at first, and Maud believes her work is proceeding in the right direction, but it's just an illusion because, during the birthday party organized by Amanda, due to an incident, Maud is removed from the house and therefore forced to leave her mission incomplete.

For the girl, this is a moment of severe spiritual crisis, allowing us to see her in her 'secular' life and take a glimpse at what her life was like before the conversion. Even without seeing it, it isn't hard to imagine that the girl experienced trauma that caused her approach to religion in such an obsessive and unsettling way. Without the presence of God, Maud is alone, and her loneliness is now more visible and palpable than before, leading her to search further, at any cost, for his presence, asking him, begging him, to tell her what to do.

Maud truly hears his voice, and we viewers hear it with her: the voice of God, clearly off-screen, is expressed in words spoken in an unknown language, it's a deep, cavernous, distressing voice. Is it really God speaking to her? Maud understands his words without need for subtitles, but, like an oracle of ancient Greece, his words, even when translated, remain obscure to us: they tell her she knows what she must do, leaving the door open to the burdensome guest of interpretation. Maud, however - whose real name, in reality, is Katie - seems to immediately understand the message and what she must do.

Maud/Katie herself is, even aesthetically, very ambiguous: her black, dilated pupils seem like those of a vampire or another supernatural creature, also alluding to demonic possession; the exalted gaze and sometimes compulsive movements, combined with her subdued appearance, testify to how Maud is a lonely, marginalized girl, prone to madness, of which religious obsession is the way it is manifested.

Yet we really see her levitate from the ground, floating in the center of her squalid studio apartment, and we hear with her the extracorporeal voice speaking to her in front of the crucifix, devices that contribute to questioning, within the film's perspective, the materialist and rational theory by which it would otherwise be rather simple to attribute Maud's actions to motivations of a psychological nature. Of course, these same scenes might also be interpretable as projections of Maud herself, who believes she hears a voice and levitates.

Ultimately, it is not possible to find a singular interpretation of the experience narrated by the film, which is situated at an intersection of mysticism, demonic possession, and madness, and what connects these three areas is precisely the centrality of Maud's body, an expression of a mystery, a driving force that remains unknown and mysterious, but of which this becomes the mouthpiece in all its power. It is no coincidence, moreover, that Amanda, the woman cared for by Maud, is precisely a dancer, and in the footage she reviews, her body moves in choreographies that express that same desire to relate to the other and the surrounding space, which Maud seeks in the union with God, but which dance, as a discipline that sees the body as the central element, seeks in earthly and secular forms. It is a desire to go outside one's own body that can only be expressed, however, through the body itself, a metaphor of the same human and earthly condition.

Saint Maud thus connects to a long tradition of body horror that finds in the female body the best protagonist, but also to the lives of mystics and saints, first among them Joan of Arc. The mixing of the religious and demonic entails an acceptance of the clichés of the genre, which see the female figure simultaneously as victim and executioner, in an eternal dichotomy that contributes to sublimating her and making the woman a terrible and monstrous creature, even though this time the gaze behind the camera is that of its female director, who seeks to create a new and non-stereotypical character.

The film has nothing to envy to the aforementioned predecessors, maintaining the same level even aesthetically, with refined images that seduce and intrigue the viewer's eye more than actually frightening it. Indeed, it is not fear that is the effect sought and produced by Saint Maud, which is more a psychological thriller wholly centered on the main character, from whose perspective it is modeled, and this, perhaps, is also the key to understanding how everything we see, with the sole exception of the final image, is what Maud sees, and by adopting her point of view, Rose Glass perhaps wants to contribute to putting us in someone else's shoes, seeing the world through her eyes, whether right or mad it is.