When considering whether I really wanted to write these reviews, I found that most of the movies I’m interested in talking about are horror movies. I was late to learn that horror stories (along with sci-fi and fantasy) often contain a ton of commentary on social issues. Great films are sticky: they keep you thinking about them long after they’ve ended, deepening your understanding of the real world. So buckle up for some stickiness cause this week we’re talking about…

Saint Maud

TRIGGER WARNING: SELF HARM & ISOLATION THEMES. SPOILERS AHEAD!

Saint Maud (2021) keeps you guessing until the very last second. Rose Glass wrote and directed Saint Maud as her first ever (!!!) feature length film, wrapping up in time for a 2020 release but waiting until COVID restrictions were lifted so it could be viewed at festivals on the big screen. She’s said that it started out as a love story between Maud and a voice in her head, and evolved into this masterful body horror classic with an absolutely unforgettable ending. Like, the ending is so good that I am not going to even tell you what it is because you just need to see it for yourself. The first time my husband and I watched it, we both SCREAMED.

This movie is a hard watch, especially if you’ve experienced isolation, have loved someone with severe mental health issues, or don’t do body horror. Despite checking all these boxes, I really love Saint Maud because:

• It’s like 80-something minutes long. I love a short-ass movie!

• The dualities between Maud and Amanda can be explored on so many levels (more on that in a minute).

• The cast is nearly all women, rare for a horror flick.

• My first time watching this one, I really did not know whether I was watching a religious horror on par with The Exorcist, or a supernatural one like Hereditary. 

• Maud’s version of DIY Christianity is clearly wannabe Catholic, but is COMPLETELY MADE UP, with mortification of the flesh rituals whenever she can sneak them into her work schedule. It’s funny to me because, as someone who grew up Catholic-adjacent, I can totally see how someone who is not Catholic thinks they are constantly finding ways to hurt themselves out of piety like by kneeling on rice and not going to the doctor when you’ve had stomach problems for months.

Maud (beautifully played by Welsh actress Morfydd Clark) is suffering: we meet her on the floor of a deceased hospital patient’s room, looking defeated with blood covering her open hands. Walking across the ceiling is a peppered roach, apparently her only witness and a creature whose species predates the concept of God by hundreds of millenia. Something awful has just happened, but it’s not clear what exactly.

Next we see Maud packing a suitcase in a dark apartment, pausing to talk to God like he’s her cool supervisor and she’s trying to move into management, “I think I’ll have to get up at about 6 tomorrow…” She tells him about her chronic stomach pain and that she’s started her period before sternly reminding him that she’s super ready for him to reveal his plan for her because she’s sure he’s got bigger plans for her than being a palliative care nurse, though she’s not complaining. No worries if not, God!

Living in physical and spiritual pain, prioritizing the latter because she desperately wants her constant suffering to MEAN SOMETHING, is Maud’s way. Arriving at her new client’s house, the departing nurse breezes over what’s what, letting Maud know that this patient has been “A bit of a cunt” before exiting. Maud’s work is to provide round-the-clock care for Amanda (played by Jennifer Ehle), a retired dancer and choreographer with stage 4 spinal cancer, checking her vitals and making her meals while Amanda chain smokes in her huge, tastefully decorated home. Quickly, she sees Amanda as a potential soul to save. Simply sharing her faith via a little pamphlet or drop of verse here and there is not enough for Maud, she wants to be her actual savior, and Amanda indulges her.

Maud and Amanda seem to have a Madonna/Whore contrast, though Glass builds both characters with beautiful complexity that goes much deeper. They both had past lives that were very different from how they are living now, with Maud having been a hospital nurse who partied during her off hours and Amanda an accomplished dancer and choreographer. The title of the book Amanda authored, The Body is a Stage, winks at how heavily this story leans on the bodies of these two women: Maude neglects her own physical and mental health, despite being a professional caregiver to those whose bodies have become frail, contrasts with Amanda, who formally used her body as an instrument of artistic expression. Both women use their bodies to feel in control of their lives, as Amanda indulges in smoking, sex and beauty to feel pleasure in her final days, while Maud’s masochistic self harm helps her feel closer to God as she begs him to make her purpose clear. 

There’s also obvious class division between the two characters, with Amanda’s apparent wealth affording her the aid of nurses who no doubt are prolonging her life by caring for her diligently, and Maud’s lack of financial and social support seeming a barrier to her basic wellness. Though close to being on her deathbed, Amanda’s well-resourced enough to enjoy earthly pleasures with friends and lovers in her beautiful home. Maud appears stuck in a cycle of terrible physical and mental health and poverty, forced to work as a caregiver when she’s in need of care.

FYI: Laura Kremmel wrote a fantastic review of Saint Maud for Horror Homeroom (link below), discussing the trauma and labor of caregiving and women’s work. It’s my favorite analysis I’ve found of the film and I highly recommend giving it a read!

It’s easy to see how someone in Maud’s position might fall into escapism. She doesn’t believe in ‘wasting pain’, going so far as to harm herself physically, including giving herself a gnarly stove burn on top of one hand, which she later picks at, unable to let herself heal. Though Maud and Amanda appear to grow close for a short time, they have a bad falling out when Maud oversteps by using her Christianity as it was meant to be: a tool to control other women’s bodies. Humiliated, Maud spirals, drinking heavily and having multiple awkward interactions at a bar, using sex to try and connect with strangers. 

Maud’s extreme faith is another way she hurts herself. Her self mutilation peaks as she cuts apart a William Blake art book Amanda had gifted her, pasting idols and angels to her apartment wall altar and cutting them to fit inside her Converse tennis shoes, pressing thumb tacks through the back so she can walk on their sharp points through town.

Maud’s is a tragic tale of how dangerous untreated illness can be, particularly for a person who has no community. Despite being a medical professional and even running into another nurse she previously worked with before the horrible accident in the first scene, Maud never gets the help she needs with her chronic GI issues, nor her mental health: instead of asking her homie God for help with these things, she tells him that if he’s trying to teach her something, she can’t see what it is, still believing her pain is meant to be a lesson. In reality, people who self harm are suffering deep emotional pain, choosing to inflict themselves in ways they can control to soothe the pain they can’t.

But it’s impossible to tell whether Maud’s dealing with mental illness, a demon disguising itself as God to fuck with her, or if her intense connection to divinity is legit. Frequently we witness Maud seize, her eyes and mouth gaping freakishly wide (Glass called these Maud’s “Godgasms”), levitating after a particularly intense one. It’s here, at her lowest, when she sees the roach again, walking into a portal at her altar. Cockroach God speaks to her, (brilliantly done in Clark’s actual voice and native Welsh, transmuted to sound deep and low). The clarity of her purpose has been Maud’s greatest desire; she believes that once God grants her this, she’ll be released of her suffering. In the final scene we see one more horrific duality.

As someone who covers her eyes during gory scenes or even a gratuitous scab-pickin’, this is one of the scariest movies I can remember during a first viewing. Watching it a second time to write this review, I felt so sad for Maud, her story reminding me of people I’ve loved who desperately needed services for physical and mental healthcare and slipped through societal cracks too many times to survive. Maud believes her story is one of good vs evil, of God vs the Devil, but her religious fanaticism and isolation cost her everything. Maud’s real demons aren’t spiritual - they’re societal (INSERT SCREAM HERE!).

More reading:

Horror Homeroom. “Saint Maud: Who Cares for the Carers? - Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom.” Horror Homeroom, 18 Feb. 2021, www.horrorhomeroom.com/saint-maud-who-cares-for-the-carers/ . Accessed 18 Oct. 2024.

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I fucking love watching movies. Indie movies have been my favorite since I was a subculture-obsessed teenager grabbing as many Cult Classic VHS tapes off the shelf at Blockbuster as I was allowed to rent on a Friday night.

I’ll be posting film reviews here over the next few weeks, on the topic of Feminist Horror, because it’s October and who doesn’t love a good film review?

The Love Witch

SPOILERS AHEAD! 

“I’m starting a new life,” the Love Witch muses before the opening credits roll, spilling a loose tarot deck from her stop sign red vinyl purse as she reaches in for a cigarette in a very 8th grade “Oh look! My tarot cards!” sort of way. A bright red heart punctured by three swords forecasts her heartbreak on the seat of her 1960’s Mustang convertible, but Elaine looks amazing in groovy, Mimi-esque electric blue eyeshadow under a gorgeously thick cat eye, her waist-length black wig barely affected despite driving top down along the NorCal coast.

Pulled over by a cop for having a broken tail light, Elaine breathes heavily as he lets her off with a warning. Rolling into Eureka, she starts back into her monologue about how men are super fragile and can become crushed if a woman asserts herself in any way. “You have to be very tricky.”

It might sound like Elaine is talking to us, the movie viewers, but she’s one of those people who is always performing for an audience of one: she smiles remembering her ex-husband Jerry’s death by poisoning, says she had a nervous breakdown after he ‘left’ her, and mentions having intrusive thoughts while flashing back to a super sketchy pagan ritual where she was bound naked and blindfolded at the feet of a dude witch in a purple robe. “My therapist told me that I’m not unusual at all.”

Samantha Robinson nails the 1960’s affect of a sexy psychopath as hyper-femme Love Witch Elaine Parks. Parking in front of a purple Queen Anne Victorian, she gathers her all-red vinyl luggage from the trunk as interior decorator, Trish, pulls up in a modern BMW just behind her, our first hint that while The Love Witch looks and feels like it was shot 60 years ago, writer/director Anna Biller released this move in 2016.

Believing this was an older cult film I’d never heard of, I expected loads of camp but was not prepared for the absolute big top circus of KAMP I was about to watch. Though there are tells that the story is in modern times, every cast member dons hair, makeup and costume from the late-60s/early-70s, each set immaculately curated to match. Portrait lighting and dramatic exploitation-era closeups block out any inkling that this move was not in fact shot in the swinging 60’s, excepting the couple of 21st century relics Biller wants you to see. Fun fact: Biller shot this one on 35mm film, and designed and created all the costumes and sets herself, a true labor of love.

Nothing is as it appears to be in The Love Witch. The story unfolds through Elaine’s gaze, as a woman who has some very outdated ideas about gender roles, believing she has to simultaneously manipulate and coddle men to get them to give her the love she says she wants. Biller does a great job layering fact and fiction, with Elaine’s delulu, righteous self-image validating every fucked up thing she does.

Trish hops out of her Beamer in a peach pant suit. She immediately tells Elaine she’s super pretty, then tells her she didn’t mean anything by it and that she’s married, though as Elaine explains to interior decorator Trish that she and the house’s owner, Barbara, used to dance together in San Francisco, Trish looks Elaine up and down aggressively, all but foghorning out an “AAAAOOOOOGAAAAAH!” The upstairs apartment is fully witched out: a wall of bottled herbs, occult paintings of topless women (most of which were painted by Biller) and candles everywhere. The two women decide to have lunch together and are suddenly in an English tea room where everyone is wearing warm pastels. Elaine starts talking to Trish about how she has fairy princess fantasies and hasn’t found her Prince Charming yet. She shares how her ex husband Jerry left her, and says it was “the day that I died,” as we see another image of Jerry dying poisoned on the floor. “But then I was reborn, as a witch!”

Elaine gives Trish terrible advice on men, telling her to keep her man pleased at all costs as the tea room harp player sings a song about a dreamy fairy lady while oogling Elaine from across the room. Everyone wants to fuck Elaine, we get it Elaine. Trish pushes back on Elaine’s nonsense as Elaine tries to convince her that she should be giving her husband his every fantasy. Elaine admits that she’s a love addict and Trish tells her she’s brainwashed by patriarchy.

My family and I love heckle-watching episodes of the animated Spider-Woman TV show, which first aired in 1979. In it, Jessica Drew stars as magazine-editor-by-day with a photographer man colleague and nephew who always seem to be waiting for her to finish working as she secretly slays bad guys, flying around on the pit cobwebs of her leotard. When Aunt Jessica returns to the menfolk, they tell her how amazing Spider-Woman just was and how gee darn she missed it again because she had accidentally fallen asleep or gotten lost between leaving work and suddenly appearing in the center of a super villain hideout. She never gives her secret away; letting them believe she’s a pretty idiot allows her to keep her power private.

What makes Spider-Woman watchable is its blatant sexism disguised as second wave feminism: the working woman who is super feminine with Barbie-like good looks, whose seat in the DC universe is supposed to be enough to be considered equal by girls, even when she’s talked down to by a little boy who can’t recognize his own auntie when she wears a mask that covers half her face in every episode is so laughable. It’s good cause it’s bad and you don’t need a women’s studies degree to be in on the joke.

I thought The Love Witch was running with this same premise, poking fun at uber-obvious gender stereotypes of the impossibly sexy femme fatale and the dum-dum men getting killed for falling under her spell at first sight, the R-ratedness allowing Biller to dive into how dangerous and absurd these tropes can get. But Elaine reminds me of a lot of women I’ve known, including myself, during times of burning one’s life to the ground. Running away to start a new life is a thing women do when we haven’t learned coping skills and our mental illness, personality issues and/or trauma make us shit magnets, ripe for unhealthy relationships. I want to teach Elaine words like “limerence” and take her to a CODA meeting.

There’s no question that Elaine is a powerful witch: we see her messing with herbs and spells cast with pee pee bottles and period blood, setting her intentions, begging the universe to bring her love. She believes these props give her power, but what’s really powerful is her addiction to sex and relationships coupled with her gorgeous, confident way of moving through the world, manifested as an outdated, hypercolor fantasy because it’s Elaine’s world we’re living in and she is totally in on the joke.

By pushing the story and character beyond the silliness of feminine subservience and into the realm of people-pleasing and delusion as trauma responses, Biller creates a painful realness that can’t be unseen once spotted. Right around the middle of the film, we see Elaine doing her nighttime routine in her boudoir, remembering her late husband Jerry, who chastised her for making dinner late and leaving a hot dog under the bed. She also remembers her dad abusing her, first verbally, then sexually, while also complementing her attractiveness. 

It’s Biller’s Technicolor glasses and biting humor that make The Love Witch a fun watch, even as, as prophesied in the first scene, Elaine smokes up dudes like Marlboro reds, love bombing them hardcore before discarding them the minute they say they’re in love with her. Elaine has zero qualms about overdosing professor Wayne, who she pulled from the street and away from a woman he was chatting with in less than a minute. She seduces Trish’s boring husband Richard with the biggest carnival glass goblet of wine and does a sexy table dance for him that drives him to suicidal obsession before setting her sights on Griff the cop, who pulled her over as she drove into town.

Griff begins investigating Elaine for Wayne’s murder and when confronted, she crumbles tearfully, weaponizing her victimhood and accusing him of targeting her because of her religion. Her heavy handed delivery of fragile white femininity proves to be her most powerful move when it comes to Griff, touching again on some real-world familiarity wrapped in candy camp. Griff invites her on a horseback riding date instead of back to the station for questioning, which they embark on immediately in matching riding outfits. They end up riding to a solstice fair where Elaine’s coven (clothed this time) tells Elaine and Griff that they need to have a mock wedding right this minute and so of course they do. As the fake newly-wedded Griff and Elaine feed each other grapes, Griff’s inner monologue goes into a spiel about how love makes a man soft and he doesn’t wanna get shot cause he got soft. 

Elaine’s inner voice responds with the all-white optimism of a cluster b baddie on a good day, riddled with red flags like how she loves his crooked mouth and the way he slurps his cereal, declaring herself not only in love with Griff, but SO FULL OF LOVE. Griff reveals his bleak outlook on women as beings who start as fantasy makers but inevitably decay into flawed, suffocating mommies fated to leave men “drowning in estrogen, the most awful feeling.” The couple, who is still on their first date by the way, grins at each other happily through this entire scene.

When meeting a black-clad, widowed Trish lunching with Elaine at what’s probably the only high tea room in Eureka again, Elaine tells her friend that she thinks the man she went on one date with is probably going to pop the question any day now! Trish tries on Elaine’s ‘promise ring’ but Elaine peaces out before Trish hands it back to her, prompting Trish to call Elaine ON HER CELLULAR PHONE to let her know she’ll drop it off at her place in a few minutes.

At the whimsigoth apartment, Trish tries on Elaine’s long black wig, makeup and negligee, playfully admiring herself before noticing an altar of Elaine’s victims, including a picture of her dead fucking husband. She finds a pentagram stationary note titled, “Love Spell for Richard”, a Richard doll, and a professional portrait of Elaine and Richard together, which is the single most unbelievable part of this entire movie to me. 

I want to call out that Laura Waddell as Trish, the only character who seems to have a functioning brain, is stellar in every scene. She plays on the classical acting mannerisms so well with Robinson and reminds us that this really isn’t the 1960’s without spoiling the magic of the mise-en-scene.

Elaine drops by her coven’s house for a quick love spell to guarantee Griff’s commitment before meeting him at the most boring burlesque club, where he’s drinking scotch alone. Arriving bubbly, her smile fades when Griff confronts her with the Love Spell for Richard stuff Trish apparently dropped by the station while Elaine was spelling it up with her witch homies. Griff’s also hip to the fact that she poisoned and buried professor Wayne and probably did the same to her ex husband Jerry. Elaine cheerfully woman-splains that she’s not guilty of anything but love love love, and that she’s being discriminated against because of her religion. Griff tells her she’s a borderline personality and she tells him he’s a narcissist, pitying him for being unable to love.

The bar staff and patrons suddenly turn on Elaine, yelling “BURN THE WITCH!”, stripping her, with some men unbuckling their belts as Griff begins punching them all in the face to save Elaine from the angry mob, whisking her away in his cop car.

Back at Elaine’s apartment for some reason, Griff rejects Elaine’s love bombing and she freaks out for a minute, seeing him as Death and visited by the ghosts of dead dicks past, each telling her, “I love you Elaine!” Griff lays on the bed and Elaine stabs him with her witch dagger, with blocking that seems homage to the brilliant French feminist film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’s, finale. This is the first time we see Elaine use violent force, making it brutally jarring, just as the fatal stabbing in the aforementioned French film is. 

Elaine sits next to a bloody, murdered Griff, fantasizing about Griff professing his love to her on their wedding day, then riding off with him on a unicorn while in reality, she smiles holding the bloody dagger as she gazes at a painting she made a few days ago of a woman holding the heart of a man lying bloody just like Griff is. The movie is bookended with closeups of The Love Witch’s pretty, made-up face, and her fatal delusions.

This was a super fun movie, well deserving of a place in the growing canon of feminist horror for women, by women. Biller plays with gender in such a smart and hilarious way, exaggerating and subverting stereotypes about men and women, desire and love, while admitting that in real life, there’s some dark shit on the other side of relationships based on domination rather than partnership. Patriarchy never releases its grip on The Love Witch: we see it in her coven, in Elaine’s fairytale fantasies, and propagated by Elaine herself. By aligning with patriarchal practices of discarding people once they show their emotions and vulnerability, she’s doomed to repeat the story she painted herself into.

Okay, was this fun? Are you coming back for the next Feminist Horror film review/recap? Let me know in the comments!

ALSO: I still want to receive and respond to advice letters, link below if you want to send one!

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