Skip to content
Saint Maud is a forthcoming movie with Jennifer Ehle, and looks weird as hell.
There, but for the grace of God, goes Maud, a reclusive young nurse whose impressionable demeanor causes her to pursue a pious path of Christian devotion after an obscure trauma. Now charged with the hospice care of Amanda, a retired dancer ravaged by cancer, Maud’s fervent faith quickly inspires an obsessive conviction that she must save her ward’s soul from eternal damnation – whatever the cost. Making her feature film debut, writer-director Rose Glass cannily lures the audience into this disturbed psyche, steadily setting up her veritable diary of a country nurse for an unnerving and ultimately shocking trajectory.
Morfydd Clark (The Personal History of David Copperfield) portrays the sanctimonious Maud with an intense stoicism that belies a disquieting vulnerability, as Maud desperately vies for absolution and solidarity from her embittered patient (Jennifer Ehle). Glass tenderly captures this relationship with an empathetic gaze that first assumes an ethereal, dreamlike atmosphere – but it isn’t long before Maud’s dogmatic candor incites an irreconcilable friction that spirals her mind into a suffocating confluence of creeping doubt and paranoia.
Saint Maud is released in the UK on May 1st, and I’ll be giving it a wide birth.
Writer/Director: Rose Glass
Cast: Morfydd Clark, Jennifer Ehle, Lily Knight, Lily Frazer, Turlough Convery
Check out the trailer below.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.