Maud’s identity as a nurse, on the other hand, remains authentic no matter how far it is thrust into the periphery whenever Maud’s past as a nurse appears, even in the midst of her deepest delusions, it shatters her constructed identity as a twisted saint and reinstates, if only for a short time, her truer self. Tragically, the more heavily Maud relies on her nebulous faith to protect her, the more distortive and hollow it proves itself to be. The corner in which the roach appears (0:01:55), however, communicates that this coping mechanism will prove claustrophobic: it will entrap Maud, and the longer she spends within this delusion, the more twisted it will become, and the further from herself she will stray.Īs religion takes on a more prominent role in Maud’s life, it becomes apparent that her faith is a veneer, scar tissue from her traumatic experiences in the hospital, both a symptom and an unhealthy coping mechanism shielding her from the pain of isolation and loneliness. But the flash of recognition on her face (0:01:57) suggests that she identifies with the creature, and so casts it, and consequently herself, in a more pleasing (holy) light. While Maud’s gesture-her arms outstretched, looking up to the ceiling (0:01:45)-has obvious religious connotations, what she actually sees is far from divine: the cockroach’s alien physicality foreshadows the abjection Maud is about to experience from society as a result of the elderly patient’s death. The opening scene of the film makes this everyday horror immediately apparent: the muted colour signifies that what we are witnessing is, though horrific, absolute reality, in contrast with Maud’s moments of religious revelation, which are alive with colour (the levitation scene being the most obvious example of this, taking place against a background of brightly flashing fireworks, (0:54:00) as well as the oversized luminous blue moon (1:09:03), and glowing red cyclones in the sky (1:17:01), among others). For while Glass’ contemporary classic can rightly be considered a religious horror, we must also contend with the fact that Saint Maud is a social horror, in which the pain of loneliness is omnipresent, and a medical horror, in which the grim realities of care, the emotionally and physically demanding work of nursing and the tragedies of an underfunded public service loom equally large. Soaked in images of crucifixes and angels, overlaid with Maud’s prayers, dreams of sainthood and (eventually) unforgettable martyrdom, religion unsurprisingly looms large in Saint Maud.īut while religion serves Rose Glass’ phenomenal debut well visually and thematically, if we (the horror-loving public) focus purely on the crucifixes, the iconography of faith, the art of Blake, we risk missing some of the film’s more prescient concerns. This tension is everywhere in Saint Maud(2019, Rose Glass): between the spiritual Maud and the secular Amanda, between zealous fanaticism and nihilistic despair, Maud’s dual role as victim and villain, the social tension between community and individuality, and the tension created when a desire to do good is marred and warped by neglect and hardship. L ike many great works of art, the power of religious horror lies in the irresistible tension it portrays: a tension between, as Timothy Beal argues in Religion and its Monsters, ‘order and chaos, orientation and disorientation, self and other, foundation and abyss’.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |