Allison Kay

It’s films like these that really make me wonder how much movie studios pay reviewers to give them the raves they get. Saint Maud is an A24 production, so you know at the very least it’ll be tense. And it was, fairly tense and a bit awkward. That’s all it really has to offer though, as any true discomfort that would make it a horror film is nowhere to be found. Instead we got: a bunch of secondhand embarrassment, an awkward protagonist, some gross shots of bugs, that thing they do in VFX where they make someone’s mouth stretch a liiiiittle too wide to be normal, the weird relationship between religion and homosexuality. The film is about eighty minutes of exposition, ten minutes of a weak attempt at a twist ending. By the end, when the movie hopes to have you wondering if Maud was a victim of a demanding God or mental illness, instead you’re wondering how all of the people interacting with this weird girl never got her any help. There are a few effective moments; Maud’s take on self flagellation had me squirming, and the juxtaposition between how Maud sees herself at the end versus how onlookers saw her was a good bit of torment for the viewer. Other than that it was a fairly watered-down take on a possession movie with some incredible acting and not much else.