hat a strange, contained, audacious film this is. Rose Glass’s silken debut hit headlines with a Tenet-beating box office performance in October, but it is in many ways the antithesis of a theatrical must-see. Draw the curtains, clutch a bottle of brandy and pray your soul makes it through to the credits. Morfydd Clark plays Maud, a palliative care nurse and recent convert to high Catholicism. Her unlucky next patient is former dancer Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), dying of cancer in a grand house on the Scarborough cliffs. “A bit of a cunt,” is the departing nurse’s description in her handover briefing. And Glass’s psycho-thriller gains rich emotional tension from the fact its victim is no pushover. Amanda is a sneering, bitter seducer, who eggs Maud on to wilder heights of evangelism and rolls her eyes with her boho pals at the young woman’s apparent naivety. Yet she’s also in pain, facing the end, terrified and intrigued by her strange new carer: all naked desperation for affection. Which woman should we pity more? Who needs saving the most? Glass has compassionate, cleareyes – not just for her two key players, but those who surround them. The former colleague and drinking buddy of Maud, who clod-hoppingly tries to help. Maud’s replacement carer: kind, flattered, a touch too down-to-earth. The horny fellas Maud helps out on an ill-fated night on the town, desperate for connection. What I loved about Saint Maud was Glass’s valediction of its heroine. The blunt reading of the film is as an insight into the mind of the zealot, someone who believes Jesus is speaking to them, and that dazzled passers-by will genuflect at the sight of their martyrdom. But Glass also allows for the possibility Maud is not the barmy one. That her levitation is real, and the wings that sprout once she’s taken some scissors to the devil aren’t simply CGI. There is a fatalism to this film that feels as dready and compelling as the whirlpools Maud conjures in the sky and the sink and in pints of lager in some of Scarborough’s least salubrious drinking spots. It sucks you in from the first frames, then has you holding your breath for 90 minutes. Yet it also leaves you feeling cleansed, sanctified, even. Maud is gunning for purity, and she is strangely infectious.