Around halfway through “Saint Maud,” writer-director Rose Glass constructs a cinematic wince moment for the ages, involving nails, bare feet and a young woman with a Christ complex far …
constructs a cinematic wince moment for the ages, involving nails, bare feet and a young woman with a Christ complex far too big for her own snappable body. “Never waste your pain,” she says, and this short, sharp needle-jab of a horror parable from bleakest Britain takes the same advice.
In its most piercing earthbound moments, “Saint Maud” even evokes the impressionistic human poetry of another shattered-woman study, Lynne Ramsay’s “Morvern Callar,” and not just because Clark has some of the young Samantha Morton’s moony, haunted ingenuousness. A memorable supporting presence in Whit Stillman’s “Love and Friendship” and TV’s “Patrick Melrose,” the Welsh thesp tears into her first leading vehicle like, well, a woman possessed — only in the quietest, most disquieting way.
Amanda is a once-celebrated dancer and choreographer, now resigned by illness and disability to a dependent existence in a dingy English seaside town. A superb, biting Ehle plays her with the regal acidity of a former queen bee now mordantly amused by her own downfall.
Gradually, we learn that her rigorous religious conversion is a recent one, and that Maud is an adopted name: Still, in this small, sad community of low-level gambling and high-level boozing, remnants of an unwanted former life surface more easily and frequently than she’d like. Whatever the lie is, it’s a strenuous one to live, and as she gives in to dissociation, Maud’s beatific exterior comes off in partial layers, as if by toxic paint stripper.
“You must be the loneliest girl I’ve ever seen,” Amanda tells Maud in a tone of both kindness and derision, and not a lot of self-awareness. For Maud, her faith is richer company than her employer’s coterie of fairweather friends and lovers, however unreliable a presence others deem God to be.
Canada Latest News, Canada Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Toronto Film Review: ‘Dads’You’d think modern-day societies would have moved past the old-fashioned narrative about fathers by now, especially with the heteronormative idea of family increasingly and rightfully shifting, cha…
Read more »
Toronto Film Review: ‘Blackbird’Roger Michell is one of the most reliably graceful directors of English-language screen drama, rising to the occasion of fine but challenging scripts (notably those he’s shot by Hanif Kureishi), th…
Read more »
Toronto Film Review: ‘Military Wives’“We don’t have the privilege to be against the war,” tuts a British wife to a peace activist. “We’re married to it.” Technically, she means married to an active-…
Read more »
Toronto Film Review: ‘Zombi Child’Never one to shy away from audacious conceits, from a Moody Blues needle-drop in a late-19th century Parisian brothel in “House of Pleasures” to the sympathetic treatment of terrorist radicals in “…
Read more »
Toronto Film Review: ‘Abominable’After descending Mt. Everest in 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary received worldwide acclaim as the first westerner to reach the top — and also snickers for alleging to spot yeti footprints and hair in the …
Read more »
Toronto Film Review : ‘Incitement’In a passionately divided democracy, the hate-filled words of politicians, cultural influencers and the right-wing media incite an extreme nationalist to commit murder. Although this plot summary s…
Read more »