Saint Maud

Saint Maud follows a nurse who after a tragedy of unable to save a patient, converts to Roman Catholic and changes her name. She's then assigned as a private carer to a celebrity. In order to prevent failing another patient, on top of doing her regular palliative work to save said patient's body, she ropes the patient into her religion in an attempt to save her soul too. What extreme and disastrous measures this lead to forms the crux.

Debutant writer-director Rose Glass does a good job in showing how Maud (Morfydd Clark) sees things versus the actual reality. This helps eliminate any unnecessary and pretentious ambiguity while giving the film a definitive meaning. The climax is bloody, along with the few stunningly horrifying images such as the rib cage-breaking and trance episodes. There's a little tension surrounding the uncertainty of Maud's upcoming actions as she stalks her former patient, including the conversation she has with the new replacement private carer. But other than these, Saint Maud is an absolute bore to get thru!

The fact that the film is only an hour twenty minutes is even more surprising, since it makes you wonder how did such a short piece like this end up boring? There are scenes, few and far between, that will stay in your mind such as Maud's painfully awkward attempt at socializing and her interaction with an ominous-sounding figure referred by her as God. But most of the times, it is nothing but dry and full of unimpressive, dull and generic happenings. However, it's certainly sad to see a character like Maud and her deep fanatical wild imagination that screams for outside help, for with it, it wouldn't have concluded in a horrifying suicide like it did.