Your Body's My Temple: The Corporeal Aesthetics of Saint Maud
Knots of damp hair seem endless as the camera slides down, almost licking the solid wall of hair locks. Both close ups and the viewer’s eye brush this uncombed texture, following a descent down this waterfall of hair: woman on her back, eyes closed. Saint Maud opens with iconography that stings, recalling surrealist photographer and filmmaker, Man Ray’s photograph, Woman with Long Hair (1929), and its cluster of associations, both dreamy and macabre. A similar image recurs, on several occasions, attesting to Rose Glass’s persistent fascination with the image of a (female) body suspended, its hair marking the only axis of gravity in a world undone. The body as a burden to be overcome chimes in the occult overtones of Saint Maud, as the titular young nurse (Morfydd Clark) compulsively attempts to save her dying patient’s soul. While Maud’s beliefs posit that bodies just get in the way of salvation, the film’s corporeal aesthetics and use of genre elements draw attention to the psychosexual relationship at the film’s core.
The world of Saint Maud feels intensely contracted; in a nameless English seaside town, and condensed even further between two sets of four walls. Early on, Maud leaves her decrepit, cockroach-infested room to move in as a palliative carer for ex-dancer Amanda Kohl (Jennifer Ehle). The house’s distinctive Edwardian look with Art Deco elements is adorned with original wood paneling that exudes a claustrophobic, yet alluring feel. A production design so meticulous complements a psychologically coherent world from the get-go. Indeed, Maud’s first-person narration often takes the shape of prayers and addresses God. As such, the film’s confessional mode aligns the viewer with Maud’s private thoughts from the start. Sharing the intimacy of her supplications feels like an aural kind of voyeurism. And in its felt presence, the camera never leaves the young woman’s side – either over her shoulder, or tailing her, as when she makes her way into Amanda’s opulent house, here, the camera acquires a presence of its own, but that feels tightly knitted with Maud’s own private audience. Saint Maud constructs a particular kind of spectatorship, one that implicates a titillated witness. The sacrosanct element of this is already visible in Clark’s features, which become almost liquid as she slumps into an ecstatic trance when cooking. Briskly interrupted by a knock on the door, there is an added layer of performativity that swells in front of a new pair of eyes entering the frame. A body in a divine stupor is also at its most vulnerable, a corporeal allegory of religious devotion that gains strength through weakness, a pattern encapsulated in the Latin phrase “Credo quia absurdum”, which stands for “I believe because it’s absurd”.
This abrupt cut is one of the tropes the film uses over and over again as both a reverence to jump-scares and spatial/temporal twists. Mark Towns (well-versed in editing horror films, including The Ritual, 2017) elevates this genre-defining editing technique to a conceptual tool that attests to both distance and proximity between states of being. Although it’s not a film about parallel worlds, in the scientific sense, Saint Maud exemplifies a type of rigorous filmmaking that sidesteps the trodden path in a flirtatious but calculated way. While in typified horror grammar, the esoteric and horrendous are just a cut away from the everyday, here, the emotionally charged is repeatedly cut short by banal invasions. Reality, whatever that means, thrusts into Maud’s ecstasies to demystify, and it’s precisely due to the accumulation of such tensions that her electrifying way of forming relations will short-circuit by the film’s end.
Scattered throughout are other instances of coexisting contradictions, such as Amanda’s fake eyelash placed gently on a plate next to her sandwich, or a montage in which the slow peeling of flesh is aurally amplified to match the opening of a popcorn bag in the following shot. There’s always something carnal to bind the worlds, and by using muscle and flesh to stitch shots and sequences together, Saint Maud, as a film, replicates the way a living organism is bound by its own structural elements. Another recurring motif to complement such synchronicity is exemplified by her striving for “more”; the plentitude of desire (paradoxically) chimes with capitalistic, insatiable automatism, and the spiritual promise of another realm, of a cornucopia where all needs are met. While Maud’s life is austere, her virtues turn out to be voracious vices, showcasing the proximity between saint and sinner. While she advocates for repentance and devotion, her messiah complex shines through and is even graphically pictured by flaring wings that adorn her shoulders by the end of the film. Thinking back, it was Amanda (her name meaning “she who must be loved” in Latin) who gave her wings, and the film does not shy away from merging literal and metaphoric meaning.
Alterations between high and low angles throughout the film mirror the conflicting views of what is considered morally commendable and what’s looked down on. Visual and abstract are, in this way, intertwined in an erotic manner, especially evident in a bold stylistic move that turns the whole frame upside down on two separate occasions to uncannily rearrange sea and sky, heaven and hell. Such is the interchangeability of Maud and Amanda’s tense bond, aligning contradictions on both religious and corporeal ground. Amanda has used her body as a stage to perform art, while Maud, as little as the film invites to reconstructing the past, has had many sexual partners. The damnation bestowed on both bodies (by the now-pious Maud herself) stands in for societal prejudice and demands the absolution of female bodies. In a way, Saint Maud presents a carnal manifesto, even if its imagery alludes to psychological states more than sexual acts. Within the film, desires, prohibitions, and intimacy are equally sexualised – evident in the otherwise neutral settings of daily exercise and the rituals of palliative care.
Glass, fresh out of NFTS, has a knack for the uncanny. Saint Maud is a debut that already feels like a career-high not only because of its aesthetic proficiency but, also, in the way it handles conceptual dichotomies. A seesaw of relations - everything in the film feels fastened in a double bind - as Maud’s ascetic lifestyle is stitched together with Amanda’s lush ways. More than a mere meeting point of extremes (of a pious catholic girl and a libidinous artist), their interaction reveals something much more layered than just an “opposites attract” kind of rendezvous. Not unlike the systole and diastole of a beating heart, the dynamics of the central relationship bring together life and death in correlation with eroticism and horror.
Savina Petkova is a Bulgarian film critic based in London, LAHP-funded PhD Student at King's College London, researching animal metamorphoses. You can follow her on Twitter @SavinaPetkova
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