Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!
My position when it comes to religion is not a secret, although I haven’t really gone into a great deal of detail on this blog. I am a formerly religious person, believe it or not, but that’s very much in my past. These days, I’m not merely someone who is areligious, but someone who is specifically antireligious. Gun to my head, I will tell you that I think that religion either causes or exacerbates every societal ill we experience, and I can argue that if necessary, although this is not the place for it. Knowing that, Saint Maud was a film that was both difficult and also an encapsulation of exactly why I find religion to be so terrible. It’s also a reminder that “passion” in the religious sense is not necessarily indicative of pleasure, but is synonymous with agony, suffering, and pain.
Saint Maud is a film that explores in very real ways that sort of religious ecstasy, the sort of intensity of feeling where pleasure and pain can no longer be separated. We will be coming at this in the person of Maud (Morfydd Clark), formerly known as Katie. Maud is a nurse who lost a patient despite her attempting CPR. She converted to Catholicism and renamed herself Maud, and takes a job as the equivalent of a hospice nurse. She’s assigned to Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a former dancer and choreographer who has stage four terminal cancer.
