Rose Glass on her cult horror Saint Maud: 'I'm still waiting for lightning to strike'

Glass's acclaimed horror has been terrorising audiences with an unforgettable tale of religious devotion
StudioCanal
George Fenwick8 October 2020

Saint Maud, the debut feature from Rose Glass, builds an unrelenting state of dread over its taut 84-minute running time. Even in the film's quietest moments, an unseen horror lurks, with the characters’ polite facades barely concealing a gradually evolving danger. The slow-burn anxiety is such that when the jump scares do arrive, they’re nerve-shredding, scream-inducing and, according to one rumour, actually injurious.

“Somebody who works at BFI sent me a message during London Film Festival (in 2019), saying that they'd been watching it with a colleague who broke their elbow because they jumped so much,” says Glass, speaking over Zoom from her London studio. “They had to have some kind of procedure. So I like to think that's true.”

Saint Maud follows a young palliative care nurse named Maud (an astonishing Morfydd Clark) caring for a former dancer, Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), who has terminal cancer. Maud, a recent convert to Catholicism following a mysterious trauma at her last job, becomes convinced she is Amanda’s “saviour” - an obsession that rapidly turns sinister, with Maud’s devotion becoming a monstrous, uncontrollable force.

“In the beginning, what I came up with was basically, ‘young woman hears the voice of God inside her head, and falls in love with him’,” says Glass. “At first, I didn't really interrogate where the voice comes from - is she actually talking to God? Or is this a kind of delusion, you know, audio-hallucination of some kind? But eventually, I started to look into that more, and the potential crossover between faith and psychosis.”

Rose Glass on the set of Saint Maud
StudioCanal

Glass was born and raised in the Essex countryside, and discovered her love for film at a young age, “probably around whenever the first Lord of the Rings films came out,” she says. “I was obsessed with that whole trilogy, and I think it was the first time I started tracking down behind-the-scenes featurettes.” Her family then bought a video camera, and Glass spent her childhood making home movies with two school friends. “I was a bit of a loser, basically,” she laughs. “And since then, pretty much every decision I've made has just been to try and get myself to a point where I'm allowed to make a proper movie.”

The first kernel of Saint Maud began as Glass was finishing her Masters at the National Film and Television School. A few years later, her script bagged her funding from Film4, and the film went into production in late 2018. After its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019, Saint Maud won critical acclaim across the board, with reviewers hailing Glass’s singular vision and stylistic control. The film’s cult reputation only snowballed from there, which Glass has struggled to come to grips with, even without a global pandemic thrown in the mix (Saint Maud was initially scheduled to be released in May).

“It all feels utterly ridiculous and slightly mind-boggling,” she says, “and I've totally not really processed any of it yet. I'm still sort of just waiting for lightning to strike or to get hit by a car.”

An unfortunate side-effect of the film’s success and attention, however, has been tiresome questions about her gender. “I had a journalist who asked, ‘being a woman and everything, how did you handle the gore?’ As if I'd be like, ‘Oh, it was so horrible!’ I wrote the f***ing film!”

Morfydd Clark in Saint Maud
StudioCanal

Glass was not raised explicitly religious, but attended a Catholic girls’ school and describes her upbringing as “typically English, religion-lite.” Her inspiration for Saint Maud was as much about belief as it was a fascination with how psychosis has been understood throughout history.

“There are some psychologists and neurologists that think Joan of Arc maybe had some kind of frontal lobe epilepsy that was accompanied by ecstatic seizures,” she says. “Whenever she spoke to God, she would fall into this kind of rapture, and hear bells, and be filled with the Holy Spirit.

“Regardless of whether people now look back and say, maybe this is just the result of some obscure neurological glitch in her head, at the time, people thought she really was communing with God. But in a way, from her perspective, it’s kind of irrelevant, because she experiences what she experiences. The reason for how and why it's happening isn't the most interesting thing that's going on. That’s how I see Maud.”

Maud’s obsessive devotion results in a shocking, white-knuckle third act that will leave viewers breathless. While Glass acknowledges that the direction she takes her religious fervour may not be everyone’s cup of tea, she actually wanted viewers to empathise with Maud’s faith. “Several times throughout the film, when Maud talks to God, she has these ecstatic episodes, where she seems to be filled with some sort of orgasmic kind of thing. I didn't want Maud’s relationship with God to just be this intellectual, pious thing - I wanted it to be something physical, because I think that's the thing that sort of everyone can connect to. Pleasure, and pleasure and pain, are some of the few things all of us respond to or recognise.”

While Glass says there has been some kickback from religious viewers, making Saint Maud has actually softened her perspective on religion. “I feel like I'm much less of a hardened cynic than I was when I was first making the film,” she says. “I personally don't believe in God in the sense of there being some kind of conscious being who has any sort of moral stake or opinion, but the idea of there being some big, as-of-yet unidentifiable force that you somehow come into connection with, I think taps into something.

“Life's confusing and messy, and I think it's normal for us to look for answers and for God to be a soothing, redemptive, healing force. Obviously it’s quite a universal thing, but potentially dangerous.”

Saint Maud is released in UK cinemas on Friday.

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