Studio CanalSitting and watching the trailer for Saint Maud myself, the further I got into it the more my face began to crumple up – and by the looks of it, I wasn’t the only one who felt this way.
The newest horror film by A24 – who brought you The Witch, Hereditary, Midsommar – is coming out May 1st 2020 and is described as a ‘genre-bending horror movie’.
In the YouTube comments for the trailer, one watcher said A24 movies make them ‘uncomfortable’ but they ‘love it’, while another said ‘another A24 picture to disturb me’ – so it’s not just me getting the creeps.
Intrigued? You can watch the full trailer here:
The official synopsis for Saint Maud reads:
The debut film from writer-director Rose Glass, Saint Maud is a chilling and boldly original vision of faith, madness, and salvation in a fallen world. Maud, a newly devout hospice nurse, becomes obsessed with saving her dying patient’s soul — but sinister forces, and her own sinful past, threaten to put an end to her holy calling.
So far, the spine-tingling film has received good reviews across the board, with 7.2/10 on IMBd, 83% on Metacritic and and impressive 91% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The film is directed by BAFTA award-winner Rose Glass. In a recent interview with The Mirror, she spoke about her new chilling film.
A24Glass said:
In the beginning, it was about a young woman who hears the voice of God in her head and it was a two-hander of her and this voice, which develops into a weird relationship, but it’s a bit different now.
I’ve always liked weird, intimate, claustrophobic, paranoid, psychological stories but then told on quite a grand scale.
Film and literature also give you this uniquely voyeuristic way of stepping into someone else’s mind for a bit.
A24Both the film and Glass herself are raved about by Oscar award-winning director Danny Boyle, who describes the up-and-coming director as ‘an extraordinary talent and powerful storyteller’.
In regards to Saint Maud, Boyle said:
[It’s] a genuinely unsettling and intriguing film. Striking, affecting and mordantly funny at times, its confidence evokes the ecstasy of films like Carrie, The Exorcist and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin.
The 2020 film’s lead actress is Morfydd Clark, who plays the sinister character, Maud. Glass describes the Swedish-born breakout actress as an ‘absolute chameleon’.
A24Glass said:
We saw quite a lot of people for that role and so much of the film’s success hinges on whether on not you buy into this young woman and care about her, but Morfydd is an absolute chameleon.
She was in three films at London Film Festival in four different roles – she has two roles in the new David Copperfield film and was also in Eternal Beauty – and I heard people saying they saw her in these separate films and didn’t realise it was the same actress.
She’s an amazing comic performer as well and it was important for me that the film didn’t descend into this angsty, overly-earnest territory. It’s quite dark, some of the stuff that happens, but we needed somebody who was sort of funny and relatable and she’s all of those things.
The petrifying picture will be hitting screens in ‘Spring 2020’ – an official date is yet to be released.
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Niamh Shackleton is a pint sized person and journalist at UNILAD. After studying Multimedia Journalism at the University of Salford, she did a year at Caters News Agency as a features writer in Birmingham before deciding that Manchester is (arguably) one of the best places in the world, and therefore moved back up north. She’s also UNILAD’s unofficial crazy animal lady.