by Zefyr Lisowski
“Never waste your pain,” the titular protagonist of Saint Maud says at two separate points of the 2019 film—first to a man asking for alms, and second in prayer to God shortly before stabbing a woman to death with a pair of scissors.
Saint Maud is almost obsessively concerned with pain: its legacy, and our capacity to inflict it on ourselves and others. In Rose Glass’s film, pain is a salvation—until, at the end, it isn’t. I talk about this relationship between pain and salvation in my essay collection Uncanny Valley Girls (out October 7 from Harper Perennial). The collection thinks through horror as a mode of intimacy, looking at films and art inflected by the horrific as a way to get closer to ourselves and others—as well as a way to think through my own experiences with trauma and illness. Above all, the collection is about the hard-won necessity of care in the wake of pain. Without it, violence continues to be externalized onto others until we eventually self-destruct—as we see, in an extreme version, with Maud.
The two characters in Saint Maud have their own relationship to pain. Maud is haunted by the emotional pain that cleaves her life into two after the accidental death of a patient in her care, and, to escape that trauma, she inflicts brutal acts of pain on herself: kneeling on popcorn kernels to pray, placing her hand on a hot stove, inserting thumbtacks into the soles of her shoes. Amanda, whom Maud cares for as a home health aide after fleeing the disaster and guilt of her previous ward, is dying of cancer. Despite her death sentence, Amanda teems with life: she sees friends, throws parties, has sex. Her pain is channeled into a desire to live, which Maud believes is suffering wasted. In rebuking Maud’s nascent but deeply held faith—both as a heretic and as a hedonist—Amanda dismantles whatever false argument Maud has constructed in order to give her pain and suffering meaning. And because of this, Maud kills her.
Another draft of this essay contextualized Maud’s life, philosophy, and pain within the lives of other women living on the edge. I connected her philosophy, as I do in Uncanny Valley Girls, to that of the Jewish-turned-Christian mystic Simone Weil. (Weil wrote: “Pain is lessened by projecting it into the universe, but the universe is impaired; the pain is more intense when it comes home again, but something in me does not suffer.”) A cockroach Maud hallucinates God in becomes an allusion to the cockroach that causes a similar revelation in Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., a book about a woman plunged into spiritual psychosis by accidentally killing a cockroach in the room of her former maid. I would connect the hurt the character felt throughout her life with the hurt felt by other women too—the throughlines of need and ache that run through all three texts.
But as allusively rich as Glass’s film is, it’s also a movie that’s almost hermetically self-contained. It runs a tight 84 minutes, with a minimal cast—Maud and Amanda are the two main characters, and certainly the most well-developed ones. One of the tragedies of Maud’s life is she doesn’t let other voices in. Even the voice of God that Maud hears at one point, emanating from her darkened apartment, is lead actress Morfydd Clark herself, her voice pitched down in post-production. By inputting other points of comparison, other voices, I’d broaden a character that, on-screen, was painfully narrow. So, I won’t do that. I’ll let her stay alone, echoing the movie’s point that pain used to justify isolation is nothing worth celebrating at all.
Maud seems to believe that suffering gives life meaning. I used to believe this too. But throughout Glass’s film, we see again and again that Maud’s experience with pain is empty, frightening, and only leads to escalation. Everything she goes through—her guilt eating away at her, the loneliness she feels (“You must be the loneliest girl I’ve ever seen,” Amanda says to Maud near the end of the movie), the torture she doles out—she hides from others, and, because of that, it intensifies. When a former friend comes in to check on Maud before she heads out to confront and ultimately kill Amanda, Maud refutes her. Apart from Amanda, Maud only allows herself to connect with higher powers: God and pain. She eschews the solace of community for that of suffering—the saddest part of an already sad film. And after Maud reifies her own righteousness in that pain, she, terrified, spreads it to Amanda, hallucinating her as a demon as she does so.
That’s the thing about survival: you need to believe in the redeemability of other people to do it. That’s one of the main takeaways of my essay collection, one of the messages that was hardest for me to learn in my own life. To counter pain, you need others. This comfort in company was one of the things Maud herself was unable to embrace, part of what makes the movie as devastating and effective as it is. So instead, I’ll just end, as the film does, with her ablaze on a beach, self-immolated after killing the second patient in her care, fantasizing about other people bowing down to her as she burns. For a second, we see Maud as an angel, filled with light, everyone around her in awe. Then the movie cuts to her on fire, screaming in pain on the beach, afraid and alone until the end.
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