There are horror elements in writer-director Rose Glass’s debut, but essentially this is a psychological character study of a woman driven to extremes by religious mania. Kate (Morfydd Clark) was a nurse at a hospital in an unnamed English coastal town where she suffered some sort of breakdown; the incident is briefly glimpsed and alluded to in later conversation with her erstwhile co-worker Joy (Lily Knight), but precisely what happened is never fully explained. It caused Kate to leave her post and go into private service, but also led to either a religious awakening or the intensification of her faith. Kate now calls herself Maud and lives an ascetic life, awaiting a divine call to the mission she is certain God intends for her.
She finds her purpose when she is hired as a caregiver to Amanda Kohl (Jennifer Ehle), a dancer-choreographer stricken with terminal cancer; she believes that she is intended to convert Amanda, a hedonistic atheist who continues to smoke and drink despite her condition and hosts soirees with her wild friends, including Carol (Lily Frazer), a sultry girl whom she pays for sex. Maud is repelled at this, but performs her functions—preparing meals, exercising her patient—nonetheless, and is heartened when Amanda occasionally seems interested in her invitations to pray and meditate.
But it eventually becomes obvious that Amanda and her friends are merely toying with Maud, mocking her religiosity and lifestyle. Maud eventually snaps, leading to her dismissal. Her obsession now takes full hold, causing her to become more and more isolated in her dingy apartment, though she occasionally wanders outside, in one tension-filled scene conversing with Amanda’s new caregiver in a way that suggests she might be contemplating violence. Ultimately she surrenders to her extreme beliefs: seized by ecstasy she feels in physical terms (at one point she actually levitates, or thinks she does), she begins to hear the voice of God speaking directly to her in a foreign tongue, the messages accompanied by shots of a large cockroach crawling around her room.
Finally, she undergoes a transformation in which she embraces what she sees as her ultimate mission, taking on a persona in which she delivers a final public statement at once shocking and. given her delusions, predictable. Clark conveys the devotion of the fervent title character with remarkable conviction, while Ehle nails the careless bravado of a woman who knows her time is short; their scenes together are a model of collaboration with a filmmaker with a distinctive vision and the skill to realize it with her expert team.
Hypnotic and arty, the brooding result will not be to all tastes, but for the more adventurous it may prove a mesmerizingly unnerving portrait of belief gone off the rails. Stylish and deeply unsettling, Saint Maud is provocative and disturbing. Recommended.