Saint Maud
Maud is a young, reclusive nurse who, after a terrible trauma, decides to follow a religious path. Maud is now responsible for Amanda’s hospice care. Amanda, a former dancer, has been ravaged from cancer. Maud’s intense faith inspires her to be a fierce advocate of saving Amanda’s soul. Rose Glass, writer/director, makes her feature film debut. She cannily seduces her audience with her disturbed psyche and steadily sets up her diary as a nurse in a rural setting for an unnerving, but ultimately surprising, trajectory. Morfydd, who is also present at The Festival in the Personal History of David Copperfield, portrays Maud as a sanctimonious woman with a fervent stoicism. However, she struggles to get help from her patient, an enthralling Jennifer Ehle (also at Festival in Beneath Blue Suburban Skies). Glass captures the intimacy of this relationship tenderly with an empathic gaze. But, it doesn’t take long for Maud’s dogmatic candor to incite an unconcilable friction which spirals her mind into an inexorable confluence between creeping doubts and paranoia. Glass is putting more pressure on the misguided martyr. Well-placed nods to William Friedkin’s The Exorcist add to the film’s dreadful malaise. When this insidious fever breaks, it can have devastating and frightening consequences. Toronto International Film Festival
Director: Rose Glass
Actors: Jennifer Ehle, Lily Frazer, Lily Knight, Marcus Hutton, Morfydd Clark, Rosie Sansom, Turlough Convery
Country: United Kingdom
