SAINT MAUD writer-director Rose Glass on her terrifying feature directing debut

Saint Maud is finally upon us.

It’s been a long and bumpy road to bring the acclaimed UK horror film to North American audiences. Rose Glass’ feature directorial debut premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival back in September 2019, where it was picked up for North American distribution by A24 (The Witch, Hereditary), and initially scheduled for release in April 2020. When it became clear that theatres would be in no shape to be up and running by then, the film was then scheduled for release in theatres this past July, which was also cancelled as COVID cases continued to climb worldwide.

After so many scuttled plans, and with fans chomping at the bit to see one of the best-reviewed horror films in years, Saint Maud will finally be available to viewers in North America when it hits on-demand services on Friday, February 12 (just in time for a very unnerving Valentine’s Day screening).

A dark and unsettling look at a young woman’s descent into madness, the film stars Morfydd Clark as the titular Maud, a home care worker in a small seaside town who is brought in to look after Amanda, a former dancer battling cancer (Jennifer Ehle). A strict Roman Catholic, Maud is both fascinated and repelled by Amanda’s libertine lifestyle and tries to unsuccessfully exert control over Amanda’s life and friendships. Living in a depressing apartment and with seemingly no friends or family to provide any help or support, Maud begins hearing the voice of God in her head, which pushes her towards extremely violent acts to show her devotion. Through intense acts of self-harm, Maud believes she is truly in a relationship with God, who seems to offer her a sense of physical pleasure as her scarifies become increasingly harmful to herself and others.

Featuring a haunting lead performance by Morfydd Clark, Saint Maud is an unforgettable and incendiary look at how unchecked mental illness and loneliness can lead to disastrous consequences. Writer-director Rose Glass has crafted a film that feels tailor-made for this terrible moment, featuring a caregiver protagonist slowly losing her grasp on her sanity as her isolation and loneliness compound to push her over the edge.

We spoke with Rose Glass about the film’s protracted release, how the film may actually play better during COVID, the battle over how much backstory the audience needs, and much more. Saint Maud is available on video-on-demand on February 12.

Bad Feeling Magazine: What does it feel like for this film to finally be opening in North America? It must have felt like Groundhog Day in some ways over the last year with these sporadic releases around the world.

Rose Glass: Yeah, it feels very weird. It has been very Groundhog Day-ish. Particularly, throughout the first lockdown. I think there were a couple of other potential release dates that were getting sort of floated around when everyone was still hoping that the whole thing would just get resolved, which didn’t happen. I was so nervous about it all back in the beginning. For obvious reasons, but also never having done all this press stuff before and promoting it and talking about it was fairly sort of terror-inducing. I’ve had to do quite a bit of it since then, over Zoom, which I find much nicer. So, in a way, the nerves have been up and down, but they’ve got a bit less. So now that we’ve got here, I’m just like, “Just get it out there so people can see it.” My head is sort of in the next thing, so it’s sort of strange kind of going back and talking about it.

Do you feel like the film plays differently during COVID in some ways? There’s such an increase in isolation and people being in their heads, so perhaps people are almost more receptive to a film like this than they may have been before.

Definitely, I think Maud skulking around in her bedsit and kind of just feeling isolated and cut off from the world and questioning whether we’ll go into hell in a handbasket, I think is something that a lot of people can connect with a little bit more immediately nowadays. It’s not at the forefront of the narrative, I guess. But the thing that seems more relevant to me is more the fact that she’s a private caregiver in the film, but it’s alluded to that she used to work as a nurse and the stresses of that job sort of partly contributed to the situation that she’s in when we meet her at the start of the film.

So, for me, when we were making the film anyway, one of the things I was hoping would come across to those watching it is how important it is to take care of the people who are taking care of all of us. And in a way not to just put them on this pedestal and say, “Oh my god, it’s such an amazing saint.” It’s like, no, these are real people as well, who need all the same care. And they make you feel grateful and ashamed of just being a wafty filmmaker instead of actually bloody doing something useful. [Laughs]

What was the thought process with showing Maud’s backstory and how much you wanted to include or withhold from audiences?

I didn’t want flashbacks. Initially, I was very nervous about it. I think what I was nervous about — which I don’t know, maybe this ended up happening — I was nervous of Maud’s whole situation and what happens to her at the end. I didn’t ever want it to feel just like a sort of chicken and egg, [where] one awful incident in flashback equals, you know, crazy lady. What I really wanted to get across is the fact that to me, this has been a long time coming for her. She’s always felt disconnected from the world. It’s been a big, messy, complicated build-up of factors in her life, and having worked in this incredibly stressful life or death stakes environment in a hospital and not really having any kind of support network of friends. Turning to unhealthy vices for escape and all the sort of usual stuff that we all enjoy. And, you know, all these things [get] compounded, and then this awful thing kind of happens, which for me was meant to be more of a sort of tipping point where maybe you have this relationship with God begin.

So, I discussed a lot of this with Morfydd before we went into the shoot and we’d worked out what the thing was that had happened in the hospital and everything. I think maybe we always did have one flashback, but less than there is now. I think the CPR bit was in it. A lot of it’s been figuring out how much to show.

Morfydd is incredible in this film. Once you settled on her casting, did that inform or change anything about the film or the character? Did you adapt anything to her specifically?

Initially, nothing sort of dramatic. We got her cast, I think like, six months before we actually shot the film. And the script changed quite a lot in those periods. Mostly, I think, because there was just stuff that I hadn’t figured out yet. And I just, hopefully, made it better than what she first read. But she… once we had her, I felt more confident, I think I was like, “Oh, she can do it.”

And she’s really good. Any of the bits where she speaks Welsh in the film obviously weren’t in the original script, she wasn’t written as being Welsh, it’s just what Morfydd is. I’m never sure what things are spoilers or whatever, but there’s a scene where God kind of speaks to her, and the language spoken was Welsh, and then that whole scene and a few other ones I only wrote during the edit. And we were sort of fortunate enough to get the funding to do a few extra days of shooting. So, that scene was very much… knowing that I needed this scene where God gives Maud a signal, and so having to figure out what it sounds like. And by that point, I’d becomes friends with Morfydd and been listening to her chatting to her mom and sister. And so it was like, “Yay, great, a lovely language that no one will recognize.”

Was it important for you that the film play on two levels, as both a straight-ahead horror film and as a psychological drama about this troubled woman?

People can interpret it whichever way, but when writing it, for me, it was very much a psychological story. And that was sort of the side I was interested in, I guess. Particularly her relationship with God, and the mission that he sent her on obviously leads her to some pretty weird places and to do some quite strange, dangerous things. There just always had to be a reason for everything she did. And I guess on the surface, you can tell the same story in a very naturalistic, bleak social realism sort of drama, I guess, without any of the God stuff, and that would probably just be, you know, young woman struggling with mental health issues and not getting the support that she needs. I wanted to try and understand why and how someone gets there. So, you know, she thinks she’s doing something incredibly important and exciting and wonderful.

But yes, each informs the other, and there had to always be… for everything that happens in the sort of more surreal narrative, there always has to be a real-life reason for why it was happening. And so most of the stuff between her which she thinks God tells her to do, for me, it’s all kind of subconsciously motivated by just whatever she’s lacking or needs in her life, which is mostly connection, support, recognition, this kind of stuff.

You’ve spoken about how the film was partly inspired by movies like Taxi Driver and those sort of antihero roles – do you consider Maud to be an antihero? Audiences might not exactly root for her, but you can definitely empathize with her.

Oh, totally, I hope people do root for her, in a weird way. I always like characters where you don’t quite know if you can trust them or not. And I just find it more true to life. Obviously, not everybody’s like Maud, but no one person is entirely good or bad or the same in every circumstance. I just enjoy spending time with characters and films that you feel you can’t quite trust, but you’re sort of along for the ride.

Saint Maud is available on video-on-demand on February 12.