Saint Fraud: The Derivative Excess of Rose Glass' Debut

 

  Take Shelter quietly predates the 'Arthouse Horror' boom of the 2010s. It came out in 2011 and didn't make the splash that It Follows, The Babadook, and Get Out would. It's a tense, creepy, and profoundly sad look at the effects of mental illness on a man and his family...OR a look at the effects of intrusive prophecies on an unsuspecting diviner. I'm still not sure if the visions mean his mind is snapping or if the world is about to. Jeff Nichols is elusive with the mystery and trusts us to interpret it our way, taking one of the most exhaustive tropes of the horror genre ("are they crazy, are they not?") and giving it a fresh, minimalist spin akin to a drama like Sling Blade.

   Saint Maud, on the other hand, takes a dizzying more-is-more approach. It never asks us if we think Maud is crazy, it outright gawks at this tragically insane religious woman.

  Critics like to lazily throw out the word 'derivative' because it sounds fancier than it is and it's so cuttingly dismissive that you think it wounds more than it does. I don't mind when things are derivative so long as they're done creatively. Like, Whiplash apes Scorsese and Thelma's style but doesn't make a lesser movie than they would have and leaves enough room to establish itself, too. Barry Jenkins' inspired use of The Demme Close-Up or any of the esoteric remixing by Tarantino are wielded with such swagger that they totally transform them. Then there's P.T. Anderson's emulation of Scorsese in Magnolia trickling down like stormwater into Sam Levinson's alchemical mimicry of both in Euphoria - which deserves its own post for being a kind of pop-cultural ouroboros. I could almost say the same about Saint Maud here in this post but it's distractingly, intricately derivative to every fault. There's no personality beyond what it's picked up from other movies in the zeitgeist of the last decade.

  Once everyone realized that nearly every movie in the infuriatingly labelled 'Elevated Horror' boom of the 2010s was just one movie after another artfully exploring grief and trauma as well as grief and trauma and grief...and...trauma, they got pretty tired of 'em; Saint Maud is late to the party and dressed like it's 2017. It's the kind of movie that checks so many A24/Arthouse Horror boxes that my eyes rolled out of my head and dangled by their ocular nerves on my cheeks.

  After a brief prologue where a Nurse is cowered in the corner of a hospital room where someone is dead in front of her and she's clearly traumatized by it (I guess that's gonna come back later? [it does]) it smash-cuts to a tall title card with sharp music and the letters fade from white to red because horrormovie.mp4 is what you're watching. We fade to a soaring close-up of an ambiguous, viscous red liquid [it's tomato soup] that looks a lot like blood [it's tomato soup] but it's bubbling unnaturally [it's tomato soup] until it cuts to reveal someone was apparently cooking...blood? And they...put it in a bowl...? I'm still not entirely sure but it sure set the mood for [a grilled cheese] something creepy.

  I'm not gonna run the whole movie down but it almost never stops being predictable and annoying like that. There's even a song that sounds suspiciously like the closing track from Hereditary's shimmery Reborn and it further cemented that Glass is intent on forgoing a personality of her own, right down to her smothering chiaroscuro which the ignorant classify as 'atmospheric' by default. No, it's just visually one-note here.

  On paper it doesn't work either. It makes a lot of the same predictable beats as every other spiraling character study. Just like Joker but unlike Taxi Driver (which both have been compared to) it's about a character who isn't really worth studying. There's nothing interesting, surprising, or relatable about them. They're both mentally ill and going untreated so we can watch their trauma violently explode.

  Rose Glass spends more time trying to make Maud creepy than she does trying to evoke sympathy for her. Her justification, I guess, is that Maud is obsessed with God and Jesus Freaks are good fodder [aka low-hanging fruit] for mockery and ridicule. I was never creeped out because Maud is clearly in the wrong movie; she needed a lighter, more sympathetic, nuanced touch. Neglected characters are one thing in a plot-heavy movie but in a character study where the light is shining right on them, it's just shameful. Glass' movie is just as hysterical and high on its own fanaticism as any Jesus Freak I know (and just as annoying, too). Imagine if DePalma wanted us to find Carrie's mental anguish scary instead of tragic, he'd be just as bad her bullies. So with its dismissive, judgmental atheistic bent, you never wonder if God is truly present when Maud hallucinates his divinity. So there's no mystery and no dramatic stakes whatsoever but, sure, let's keep watching this woman deteriorate.

  Glass' frequent, laughable imagery via Maud's hallucinations come across so tryhardy that Baz Luhrmann sent flowers. The visual motifs operate on two modes: briefly eerie until the insecure punchline cut lets us know "she was just seeing things" or they're so over-the-top and silly that they diminish any and all mystery altogether. They're just masturbation, a case of style pretending to be substantive but it's all fucking nebulous. The ending, especially, is a roaring thesis statement that, I guess, is consistent. The last frame is meant to scare us but it's another cheap jumpscare (with equally dull cgi to match) that it's just one more annoyance.

  There's a scene where Maud is fucking some guy and Glass juxtaposes her POV of riding him, hands on his chest for balance, with her POV of giving chest compressions to her dying patient from the prologue. It's an evocative, uncomfortable mix of imagery, the first moment where I liked what she was doing creativ---dang, Rose hallucinates that her hands crushed his chest and she screams as he spits up blood--we predictably cut to him, very much alive, asking her what's wrong. Clearly Maud's coping mechanisms are unhealthy and she has intrusive thoughts but it's done like a cheap jumpscare and undercuts any effect it'd had on me, both for the horror and the drama.

  And, since this is trauma porn, the guy has to roll Maud over and rape her because cheapness ain't in short supply with this goddamn[ed?] movie.

 D+