Saint Maud

[Ezee E]

WIKI

[Ezee E]

I should probably drop this down some.

It's effective when it builds to what it's going for. It just chickens out by having the main character be a very unstable person, and nobody acknowledges the awkwardness one bit. [

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Including a fired nurse getting into a house and the patient not being the slightly bit concerned.

]

Terrific last second shot though.

[StuSmallz]

I should probably drop this down some.

It's effective when it builds to what it's going for. It just chickens out by having the main character be a very unstable person, and nobody acknowledges the awkwardness one bit. [

Show Spoiler

Including a fired nurse getting into a house and the patient not being the slightly bit concerned.

]

That seems to be a trend in certain A24 movies, because it reminds me of that moment in Hereditary ​when [

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Gabriel Byrne's otherwise supportive husband decides to randomly not inform his wife that her mother's grave has been desecrated because... reasons? It's like, have you guys ever actually interacted with other human beings before?

]

[Ezee E]

That seems to be a trend in certain A24 movies, because it reminds me of that moment in Hereditary ​when [

Show Spoiler

Gabriel Byrne's otherwise supportive husband decides to randomly not inform his wife that her mother's grave has been desecrated because... reasons? It's like, have you guys ever actually interacted with other human beings before?

]

Yeah, Hereditary works for a while until it really goes off a deep end in the last half hour or so.

[StuSmallz]

Yeah, Hereditary works for a while until it really goes off a deep end in the last half hour or so.

Yeah, but it lost me a lot earlier than that to be honest, at about the halfway point during the scene with the [

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seance, when it plays that very inappropriate, "heartwarming" emotional music in the middle of these supernatural horrors, as if the "Unchained Melody" scene from Ghost had gotten randomly spliced in during editing. It didn't recover from that point, unfortunately.

]

[megladon8]

I've lost so much respect for you guys.

[Henry Gale]

I saw this (wow..) 18 months ago at TIFF (in a theatre! with other people!!) and even though I think Morfydd Clark gives a compelling performance and Rose Glass is clearly talented as a stylist and creator of atmosphere, I completely agree with you, E, that the film never quite seems to gain any traction with its intended tension by just making the protagonist so devoid of earthly reason or connection to emotional logic beyond what she feels through her religious fanatical delusions.

It absolutely did not work for me, but I've been happy that so many others have seemingly gotten so much out of it. I just wish I saw the same movie they did.

I do love Hereditary, though! At least its unreliable narrative you guys speak of only helped fueled its unsettling nature for me.

[StuSmallz]

I saw this (wow..) 18 months ago at TIFF (in a theatre! with other people!!) and even though I think Morfydd Clark gives a compelling performance and Rose Glass is clearly talented as a stylist and creator of atmosphere, I completely agree with you, E, that the film never quite seems to gain any traction with its intended tension by just making the protagonist so devoid of earthly reason or connection to emotional logic beyond what she feels through her religious fanatical delusions.

It absolutely did not work for me, but I've been happy that so many others have seemingly gotten so much out of it. I just wish I saw the same movie they did.

I do love Hereditary, though! At least its unreliable narrative you guys speak of only helped fueled its unsettling nature for me.

That's actually part of the reason why I didn't like it, particularly with the awkward way it tried juggling being a domestic-focused, "disintegrating family" Drama, and a Supernatural Horror movie at the same time. It's a potentially promising concept in theory, but in practice, one side undermined the other, like the way that...

[

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...we're expected to feel the senseless tragedy of Charlie's sudden death, but Charlie herself is a cliched, creepy Horror movie kid from her very first scene, one who exhibits nothing but negative, unattractive behavior and vibes the entire time she's onscreen (which the rest of the family just shrugs off for no reason, which is more characterization that makes little sense), and it's so obvious from the very first frame she's in that nothing good is going to happen with her, so it wasn't a tragedy at all for me when she died, but more of a relief, and there's no way even Collete's performance was going to make me feel otherwise about her. It's like if The Omen had killed off Damien at some point, and then tried to get me to mourn for the lil' Antichrist, you know?

]

[transmogrifier]

The main problem with Saint Maud is that for some reason it tries to make a half-arsed mystery about (cue scary strings!) "her past!" in that lazy indie fashion (gotta play keep away with the backstory lest the audience realize there is not much going on in the fore(?)story!)

[Ezee E]

That's actually part of the reason why I didn't like it, particularly with the awkward way it tried juggling being a domestic-focused, "disintegrating family" Drama, and a Supernatural Horror movie at the same time. It's a potentially promising concept in theory, but in practice, one side undermined the other, like the way that...

[

Show Spoiler

...we're expected to feel the senseless tragedy of Charlie's sudden death, but Charlie herself is a cliched, creepy Horror movie kid from her very first scene, one who exhibits nothing but negative, unattractive behavior and vibes the entire time she's onscreen (which the rest of the family just shrugs off for no reason, which is more characterization that makes little sense), and it's so obvious from the very first frame she's in that nothing good is going to happen with her, so it wasn't a tragedy at all for me when she died, but more of a relief, and there's no way even Collete's performance was going to make me feel otherwise about her. It's like if The Omen had killed off Damien at some point, and then tried to get me to mourn for the lil' Antichrist, you know?

]

This is true. Like, I get that maybe the family obviously loves her and can accept her awkwardness, but figured something would come out of her showing up at a teenage party, but hardly anything's even mentioned, much less that some kid is there with drinking college kids wandering around.

[StuSmallz]

This is true. Like, I get that maybe the family obviously loves her and can accept her awkwardness, but figured something would come out of her showing up at a teenage party, but hardly anything's even mentioned, much less that some kid is there with drinking college kids wandering around.

Yeah, plus, that's another example of a scene that suffered from Aster's direction, with the "ominous" shot of the...

[

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...nuts getting chopped up (which is another detail that rings false; a fancy chocolate cake getting baked at a rowdy teen party?) just a minute before Charlie eats the cake; it's like, gee, I wonder what's going to happen next? It's so easy to imagine a better, alternative way of foreshadowing that, like with a shot of Charlie's Epipen having been left back at her house after she gets rushed out the door by her mother, which would give us a bigger gap of screentime between the setup and payoff, and have the latter arrive as at least somewhat of a surprise, but as it is, it just serves as another example of the film suffering from its own insistence on using a cinematic sledgehammer when it needed a scalpel.

]