Spooky season is here and by the looks of things, Saint Maud is the spookiest chiller you could hope for in such a dark and gloomy month. By all accounts, it’s one of those films you want to go into knowing as little as possible - so let’s just say it features a God-fearing nurse, a petulant patient, an immortal soul and a lot of unsettling goings ons.
If you want to take everyone’s advice, don’t even bother watching the trailer before you go - these five things alone should be enough to convince you.
If you want to take everyone’s advice, don’t even bother watching the trailer before you go - these five things alone should be enough to convince you.
1. No one who’s seen it is sleeping well
Just as horror films are always managing to come up with new and creative ways of terrifying us, people are always coming up with new and creative ways of expressing that terror on Twitter. We’ve seen a range of emojis used for Saint Maud, from ???? to ?????? and even ???? (?). And a LOT of talk about a particularly harrowing matter of seconds.
2. AND the reviews have been insane
Five stars (almost) across the board - it currently has 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. Little White Lies described it as “A queasily tense descent into the blindest of faith.” Mark Kermode praises how it craftily “shifts between intimate kitchen-sink pathos and shrieking supernatural surrealism, often within the space of a single scene, that Saint Maud seems to takes on a shape-shifting quality as it slips between the inner and outer realms of Maud’s experience.”Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian also gave it five stars and warns us that Morfyyd Clark is a terror: “in this extraordinary horror melodrama... [she] gives an operatically freaky turn that knifed me in the kidneys... And her final split second on screen is the equivalent of brutally pulling out the knife to start the internal bleeding.” And the Independent’s critic called it “the year’s best horror film... a magnificent slow-burner, a portrait of a woman headed toward an apocalypse of the self” which sounds horrific and we are here for it.
3. It’s from the same company as The Witch, Midsommar and Hereditary
Aka A24, the indie production company that loves to scare you witless and leave monstrous images living rent free in your head. Smart, brain-burrowing scares. The kind that never really leave you, especially when you’re lying awake at 4am...
4. The cast and crew are apparently incredible
It’s Rose Glass’s first feature film, and she has a name that echoes the film’s brittle style. You might recognise Morfydd Clark from The Personal History of David Copperfield (although you probably won’t because she’s unrecognisable in this role) who gives a performance that’s roundly agreed to be incredible. And Jennifer Ehrle echoes the brooding Scarborough setting: dark seas, dark deeds.
