Lists

Picture of a movie: American Beauty
Picture of a movie: Goodnight Mommy
Picture of a movie: Palm Springs
Picture of a movie: The Other Lamb
Picture of a TV show: Nine Perfect Strangers
Picture of a movie: The Witch
Picture of a TV show: Midnight Mass
Picture of a movie: The Lodge
Picture of a TV show: The Handmaid's Tale
Picture of a TV show: Utopia
Picture of a movie: the blackcoat's daughter
Picture of a movie: Thoroughbreds
Picture of a movie: Promising Young Woman
Picture of a TV show: Sky Rojo
Picture of a movie: The One I Love
Picture of a movie: You Should Have Left

14 Movies, 5 Shows

2021 Gems

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My fav findings of 2021 so far

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Picture of a movie: Saint Maud
movies

Saint Maud

2021
There, but for the grace of God, goes Maud, a reclusive young nurse whose impressionable demeanor causes her to pursue a pious path of Christian devotion after an obscure trauma. Now charged with the hospice care of Amanda, a retired dancer ravaged by cancer, Maud's fervent faith quickly inspires an obsessive conviction that she must save her ward's soul from eternal damnation - whatever the cost. Making her feature-film debut, writer/director Rose Glass cannily lures the audience into this disturbed psyche, steadily setting up her veritable diary of a country nurse for an unnerving and ultimately shocking trajectory. Morfydd Clark (also at the Festival in The Personal History of David Copperfield) portrays the sanctimonious Maud with an intense stoicism that belies a disquieting vulnerability, as Maud desperately vies for absolution and solidarity from her embittered patient (an enthralling Jennifer Ehle, also at the Festival in Beneath the Blue Suburban Skies). Glass tenderly captures this relationship with an empathetic gaze that first assumes an ethereal, dreamlike atmosphere - but it isn't long before Maud's dogmatic candor incites an irreconcilable friction that spirals her mind into a suffocating confluence of creeping doubt and paranoia. As Glass tightens the screws on her misguided martyr, well-placed nods are made to religious horror forerunners like William Friedkin's The Exorcist, further contributing to the film's increasingly dread-filled malaise. And when this insidious fever climatically breaks, the consequences are devastating and terrifying in equal measure.