85 min | R | January 29, 2021 | A24
Maud is a hospice nurse who has found God and decided her terminally ill patient’s soul is hers to save. Amanda is a dying ex-dancer who finds the whole thing amusing until she doesn’t. Devotion this total has nowhere to go but down.
Maud is a palliative care nurse assigned to a private patient in a faded English seaside town. She is a recent convert to Catholicism, and she talks to God directly. Her new charge is Amanda, a former dancer and choreographer dying of lymphoma, sharp-tongued and unimpressed by piety. Maud decides Amanda’s soul is the assignment, not her body, and the film follows that conviction as it metastasizes. This is a film about loneliness wearing the mask of faith, and about a woman who needs to be needed by something larger than the life she actually has.
Morfydd Clark plays Maud with a stillness that reads as serenity until it reads as something worse. She narrates her prayers in voiceover, and Clark lets the certainty in her voice curdle by tiny degrees. Her physical performance is precise. Watch how she holds her hands, how she kneels, how she presses her body into the floor as if waiting to be filled. Jennifer Ehle plays Amanda as a woman who toys with Maud out of boredom and then recoils when the game turns real. Ehle gives Amanda a cruelty that is also a kind of clarity, and the two actresses build a relationship that is part seduction and part exorcism.
Rose Glass writes and directs her first feature with a control that never loosens. She shoots Maud’s world in cramped interiors and sickly amber light, then tilts the camera and inverts the frame when God supposedly speaks. The sound design does the heaviest lifting. Glass uses a low rumbling drone and sudden silences to put the divine and the deranged on the same frequency, so the audience can never separate revelation from breakdown. The editing withholds context, keeping us locked inside Maud’s perspective until her perception becomes the only reality the film will grant.
This is a horror film about the gap between how Maud sees herself and how the world sees her. Glass refuses to grant her protagonist the dignity of certainty and refuses to grant the audience the comfort of distance. The final image arrives with a clarity that reframes everything before it. It does not explain Maud. It indicts the loneliness that made her, and it trusts the viewer to feel the difference.