In the Flesh: Saint Maud

You seldom see a film approach self-harm with the understanding that it serves a purpose. When we cut and burn and prick and beat ourselves, it’s because no other release is conceivable or accessible. It’s an escape from the cloying physical prison of panic, of suicidal spiraling, of flurrying thoughts and the crushing burden of loneliness. Rose Glass’s Saint Maud is the rare film to encompass all of that complex suffering effortlessly, to sketch a protagonist just self-aware enough to know that she’s awkward and unwanted, but not so self-aware that she’s able to seek help, or to change. How could such a person fail to turn to self-mutilation when the world around her is so unrelentingly disinterested? In one scene Maud attempts to join in on a group’s private joke by laughing along with them, only for their mirth to congeal into pitying disgust at her unskilled social maneuvering. Not long after this we glimpse the razor scars marching in neat rows along the curve of her belly and watch her pick at a self-inflicted stigmata on the back of her hand.

Maud’s self-inflicted injuries are a kind of plea, not just in the classic therapeutic sense of a cry for attention but in that she knows something in herself is desperately, painfully wrong. Like the chronic stomach pain — a common psychosomatic consequence of intense and prolonged stress — she neither discloses or seeks treatment for, or the identity we learn she cast off in an attempt to escape a traumatizing experience in her work as a nurse, self-harm provides Maud with another way to symbolically cast off the self she perceives as impure and unworthy. The more of herself she picks and cuts and stabs, the more room there is in her fraying psyche and faltering body for the presence of God. On some level she may know that this is all a proxy for human connection — as evinced by the ease with which her faith is shaken, the abruptness with which her enraptured attitude toward the dying Amanda changes — but what else is there for her?

As Maud, Welsh actress Morfydd Clark harms herself with a numb, dogged insistence, the same affect to which she defaults when a man decides to rape her. This is something happening at her, to her. It does not originate with her but with her contact with the outside world. What happens when someone without social tools or emotional resilience is traumatized? They default to anything that grants relief. Maud is chasing accidents of brain chemistry through a labyrinth of reactive anguish, and the people who see it understandably find her so tiresome and unpleasant that they react with scorn rather than compassion. So how could there be anything, at the end of that lonely, hateful, bitter life, than a final cleavage of reality — a rejection of the entire malfunctioning body and brain in favor of the cool, clean relief of cutting off the parts of yourself you’ve come to understand no one could love.