When you stop to think about it, some expressions of religion are extremely lurid, if not downright terrifying. In Christianity, this goes all the way back to Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God, moving up through the hellfire-and-damnation tradition in Protestantism, alongside the horrifying tribulations of Catholic martyrs. I mean, there’s a reason there’s a (very good) horror movie called Martyrs. And a younger, edgier me would have called The Passion Of The Christ the first real “torture porn” film, because it’s sure as shit as bloody as one, and its violence as lovingly lingered over. I mean, the word “awe” can refer both to reverence and to dread.
Devotion is fertile ground for horror, is what I’m saying. And Saint Maud - a stark, carefully told story about the place where faith and madness overlaps - explores it skillfully. It’s equal parts drama, horror, psychological character study, and account of tragic decompensation.
The film opens on a woman huddled in the corner of some kind of institutionally tiled room. There’s a pile of rumpled bedding on a gurney, the dim flicker of fluorescents. A roach crawls across the ceiling as the woman, her face smeared with blood, stares blankly upward.
Flash forward to some time later. The woman is Maud, and she’s a nurse for a private hospice care organization in seaside England. She finds value and purpose in her work, bolstered by her recent conversion to Catholicism. She credits her faith for rescuing her when she was lost, and tries to be an agent of grace for the dying. She’s starting a new posting at the mansion of Amanda Kohl, a celebrated dancer and choreographer, who is in the late stages of spinal cancer. Dying and confined to a wheelchair, Amanda sits in her big house in small-town England, away from London, watching recordings of her old performances. There’s an anger there, a bitterness. It’s understandable. Maud helps her with her exercises, administers her shots, her vile-tasting medications, bathes her, cooks for her. And as they begin to converse, Maud explains the value of her faith to Amanda, and Amanda seems receptive, if not someone astray in her grief. And so Maud realizes what she must do - it is her responsibility to bring Amanda back into the fold of the saved, to make her soul ready for heaven.
You see, Maud hears God speaking to her.
It’s told in small, smartly underplayed ways - this is a film that is very good about showing instead of telling. It’s not short on dialogue, but people’s behavior, how they say things, tells us as much as (if not more than) what they actually say. Occasional flashbacks and asides give us brief glimpses into who Maud might have been before, and how she ended up like she did, but it’s never entirely spelled out, and doesn’t really need to be. Something bad happened, she took it perhaps harder than she should, and it broke something inside. She’s looking for transcendence, penance, salvation, and she feels God moving through her, speaking to her. So for as much as we’re aware of her devotion (and the things underneath she’s repressing), we also see that she’s lonely, traumatized, and not really stable. It’s longing for connection, for forgiveness, for punishment. There’s a lot of guilt there, and she’s just barely holding it together.
And what this means is that at some point, she’s going to fall apart. She’s a devout young woman caring for someone older, someone unapologetically gay, someone angry at a world that has condemned her to a slow death and the denial of movement after a lifetime spent celebrating it. Amanda lashes out - somewhat cruelly - and Maud falls, and falls hard. There’s a lot to unpack in her fervor in contrast to the life she led before, suggestions of repressed or sublimated sexuality, a need to punish herself for her transgressions, real or imagined. Lots of stories about saints involve tribulations and mortification - for some expressions of religious faith, the line between agony and ecstasy is extremely thin, and there’s all sorts of stuff to be mined here, given what Maud seems to be grappling with and traumatized by. The second half of the film shifts the focus from Maud and Amanda to Maud alone, as she spirals into something masochistic and sordid, soundtracked by moody synthesizer which moves from minor key ambience to ominous swells, the rumbling before the storm and the thunder alike.
Maud takes her penance and her holy mission very seriously indeed, and as the movie goes on the contrast between how she sees herself and how she is seen by the world becomes sharper and sharper until the very end, which is as horrifying as you’d expect, in many of the ways you’d expect. And I think maybe in some ways this is a weakness of the film. As a character study, it’s pretty strong - it’s not often that the films I write about here remind me of Taxi Driver, for example, but this one sure does - but the shift in focus halfway through robs the film of some momentum and tension, and for me the end was forecasted maybe a little too heavily - it feels less shocking than it does a foregone conclusion (though it’s certainly strikingly conveyed) and would have benefited from a stronger commitment to the unreliability of Maud’s perspective that brings us to that point so well. Still, it plays fair with everyone involved, and for as horrific as it can be, it’s tragic as well. As so often is the case with martyrs.
IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon
No comments:
Post a Comment