Rose Glass was only 29 when "Saint Maud" premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019. The movie is an intense, riveting horror film that focuses on a young woman named Maud, a palliative care nurse for an American dancer and choreographer named Amanda.
Amanda is terminally ill with stage four lymphoma. Maud believes God speaks to her directly and that their special relationship can help save Amanda’s soul. Glass wrote and directed "Saint Maud" which is now streaming on the EPIX cable network.
"I started coming up with an early version of the idea just as I was finishing film school in 2014," Glass told WPR's "BETA." "I was interested in the idea of doing a two-hander between a woman and a voice in her head, and then the story developed very gradually and slowly from there over the next few years."
One of the challenges Glass faced in writing the screenplay was making the narrative operate on two levels — the real world story and Maud's own story. She described the process as "an ongoing sort of balancing act."
"The lens that we see everything through is obviously through Maud's perspective," Glass explained. "And in her mind, it's very unambiguous what's going on. And she is in communication with God, and she's on this mission and that's what's happening."
Glass has said she wanted her film to appeal to both people who believe in God and people who don't. That's why she tried to think of a universal way of connecting with God that even secular audiences would find accessible.
"I didn't want it to just be this sort of lofty academic thing that we just take it at her word that she's talking to God," she said.
Maud goes to such extreme lengths for the love of this God that Glass felt the audience needed to understand Maud is experiencing something outside the ordinary.
"The point of the film for me was never in any way to kind of be Christian bashing because I think there's plenty of that that goes on anyway," Glass explained. "Obviously, I have my cynicism and deep suspicions of a lot of things to do with organized religion."
For Glass, it's a more of an emotional psychological film than it is about spirituality.
Welsh actor Morfydd Clark plays Maud, delivering an outstanding performance throughout the movie.
Glass said she would love to be able to say Clark played the part of Maud exactly as Glass wrote it. But Clark turned the character into something much more complicated.
"She's just a phenomenal actor," Glass said. "And her range is insane. She made my job a lot easier because both her and Jennifer (Ehle, who plays the woman Maud is looking after) get things really quickly."
Glass used the word "Godgasms" to describe the ecstatic experiences Maud is subject to at various times throughout the film.
"God is coursing through her, and she appears to be having an orgasm," Glass explained. "For people who don't believe in God, the idea of being touched by God probably doesn't resonate with them."
"But suddenly being struck down by an orgasm, I think we sort of can imagine what that that feels like."
Despite the obvious sexual connotations involved with an orgasm, Glass sees the "godgasm" as more of "a kind of euphoric, transcendent hallucinogenic kind of thing."
Without giving away any spoilers, "Saint Maud" has a very powerful ending.
"It doesn't go well at the end. I knew I wanted to get to that point for quite a long time," Glass said. "The mechanics of the story, in particular the act leading up to it, that changed around a lot during script writing. And that was the bit I was most kind of stuck with and kind of banging my head against a brick wall for ages. It felt like to end it any other way by that point would feel like a bit of a cop-out."
