Signs and Wagers: Saint Maud Review
Spoiler Warning: This post contains details on key story elements of Saint Maud, including its final scene. The movie is amazing, available to rent, and only 84 minutes long. Go watch it first!
Seventeenth century French mathematician Blaise Pascal argued that given the high stakes at play under the rule of a Catholic God, the rational choice is to believe in Him. The idea behind Pascal’s Wager is this: the world is either Godless or God-ruled, and you can live your life according to whichever you believe to be real, but since you cannot know which type of world we live in, and because the God-ruled world has eternal existential consequences at life’s end, the smart money is on acting as if God exists. Simply, if you live life as if there is a God and it turns out you’re wrong, you meet abyss like the rest of the atheists, but if God does exist then you receive eternal life and avoid the eternal damnation of the sinners and apostates. And that all sounds easy on paper, but what if your God is one of the demanding ones? And why wouldn’t He be – the big guy does have a penchant for smiting.
That’s the conundrum in Rose Glass’ inspired Catholic horror film Saint Maud, an 84 minute injection of breathless anxiety, grief, hope, and devotion. The movie follows the titular Maud (Morfydd Clark), a private palliative care nurse who becomes obsessed with saving the soul of former dancer Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a terminal lymphoma patient in her forties. As Maud bathes, feeds, and medicates Amanda, we learn the nurse came to God later in life, after a traumatic evening in which she killed a person while administering chest compressions during resuscitation. God’s love gave her purpose, and helped her channel the pain of her trauma. But Maud isn’t simply a hyper focused after-hours Sunday school teacher. She literally feels God’s presence, and his absence. She even speaks to Him and hears His voice.
The supernatural images and sounds act as foundational set pieces in Saint Maud, but in tune with the tradition of all the best tortured horror protagonists, each unbelievable event is given the benefit of unreliable narrator, leaving it up to the audience to decide whether Maud is acting as the hand of God or suffering from Willaim Blake inspired hallucinations. Maud levitates off the kitchen floor in her tiny apartment, she holds council with the voice of Jesus at her makeshift altar (in a chilling scene that feels like the inverse of the Black Philip exchange in Robert Eggers’ The Witch), and she even brutally confronts an adversarial entity inside Amanda, killing her patient in the process. In each preternatural moment, Maud is convinced she is seeing divine truth, and the only people left alive after her encounters with the privilege to doubt are the audience and the single cockroach that lives with her.
The only parts of the film given to non-believers are presented as challenges to Maud from the secular world. The sneering, laughing, self-important happiness of others represents the other half of the religious 50/50 draw. As Maud is tortured through her private worship, burning her hand on a stove, putting thumbtacks in her own sneakers, I didn’t want her pain to be wasted. She bet so hard on God, so much harder than everyone else, and I wanted her to score big. But even in the film’s final frame, we are left in Pascal’s lurch: is this the becoming of a saint, or are we watching a modern day Don Quixote meet her violent conclusion.
Even in Saint Maud’s final moments, when our might-be savior is compelled to publicly self-immolate on a beach, we are given two possible realities: we see an image of an angelic woman ascending to the pantheon of Catholic Saints, and a brief glimpse of a blackened, screaming human head writhed in chemical-fueled flame. The onlookers are brought to their knees at the vision, clearly in awe, but we don’t know which one, and let’s be honest, both are worthy of collapse. All that remains is the question of what we witnessed, and whether both realities can exist at once. Saint Maud captures the passion of the core question of personal Catholic faith, in all its torture and glory, and miraculously foists the burden of belief and the canonization of its protagonist on us. It shows us a world where our pain matters and another where we suffer in vain, then asks us to place our bets.