Help Thou My Unbelief: Saint Maud (Rose Glass / 2019)
In a new religious horror film, the scariest thing is belief itself.
Maud (Morfydd Clark) is a true believer, a fanatic, the kind of person you don’t want to sit next to on the bus or strike up a conversation with, for fear she’ll try to tell you about the Lord. She’s a home nurse, a caretaker, but her kindnesses come with secret agendas, hidden designs. Her ailing patients need her to alleviate their suffering, but Maud’s greater purpose is to turn them to God.
Her new patient, Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), is dying. Before she got sick Amanda was a famous dancer and choreographer, worldly and hedonistic where Maud is ascetic and self-denying. Amanda presents a challenge for Maud. She doesn’t believe. And Maud wants to save her.
Maud comments on her attempts to save Amanda in an ongoing voiceover where she speaks to God in a voice that is sometimes worshipful, sometimes paranoid and angry. She’s often angry, Maud is, her expectations of herself and of Amanda and even of God too easily frustrated. She believes so fiercely that things will go a certain way, that they must, that when events don’t conform to her faith, she’s shattered. It’s not long before we begin to fear for her safety, for Amanda’s. This is a scary movie—and the scary thing here is Maud, the fierceness of her faith. It’s a dangerous thing.
Her belief is thing that goes bump in the night.
The film, Saint Maud, is a religious horror movie, a category that includes such classics as Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen. The question to ask of any horror subgenre is what makes it scary, and the answer for religious horror is the claims of religion, generally the Christian religion. In these films, unsuspecting modern rationalists wander into storylines where the elderly upstairs neighbors are Satan worshipers, where a little boy is the Antichrist, where a girl is possessed by an ancient demon. A world where these things are actually possible.
Religious horror movies, in short, tend to scare their audiences by positing a world where the claims of Christianity—a medieval version of it, perhaps, but Christianity nonetheless—are true. This is the nightmare of religious horror, the monster under the bed, the ghost in the closet, the masked murderer hiding in the shadows: the notion that God might actually be real.
The Conjuring, a recent and franchise-spawning entry in the religious horror canon, takes the most straightforward approach to this that I’ve ever seen, ending with a direct appeal to the audience to follow the Christian God. The story subjects an unsuspecting family to a haunting, a possession, and ultimately an exorcism. The film closes with a quote from the real demon-hunter who inspired Patrick Wilson’s character in the film:
The devil is real. God too. Follow one or the other. (Dylan: “You gotta serve somebody.”) It’s so naked, so obvious, that a friend described the film to me as “a two-hour altar call,” like one of those youth rallies we were subjected to as evangelical youngsters, where they’d first scare the shit out of us with descriptions of hell, then invite us to commit our lives to Christ.
This is the genre tradition Saint Maud sits within. Except the film turns the tradition on its head—and it’s here I must warn you that I intend to spoil this movie, because (here it comes), the supernatural elements of Saint Maud are not real. She’s not talking to God, not battling demons for control of Amanda’s soul. It’s all in her head.
In Saint Maud, the monstrous thing is not that religion is real. In this world, religion (at least Maud’s form of it) is false. The monstrous thing is belief.
At first, Maud’s belief is merely embarrassing, maybe slightly unseemly. It’s something unsuited to the situation she finds herself in, where poor Amanda merely wants some relief from her pain, a bit of peace while she waits for death to take her. We cringe whenever Maud introduces her faith into this context, sensing in a way she can’t or simply won’t that her religion is something unwanted, something Amanda just doesn’t need.
Amanda treats Maud’s faith as a curiosity at best—gently probing Maud about her belief, her visitations from God. Maud claims that God visits her body sometimes; the result are ecstatic fits that appear to be akin to orgasms. In one fascinating scene, Amanda asks Maud if she can make one happen, if she can bring God down upon them right then and there, and Maud closes her eyes as the ecstasy comes over her. Amanda joins her in moaning, but her peeking through open eyes and the smirk on her face tell us all we need to know—Amanda is mocking Maud.
Belief is embarrassing, unseemly—maybe joyless and bigoted too. Amanda’s sole happiness comes from a romantic fling with Carol (Lily Frazer), a woman who comes occasionally for sex. Maud doesn’t approve. She thinks Carol is an obstacle to Amanda’s finding God. We sense a touch of homophobic intolerance in Maud’s disapproval. She doesn’t know, or perhaps can’t let herself see, that Carol brings more genuine joy to Amanda in her dying days than anything Maud can offer—that sexual pleasure and worldly companionship could be more fulfilling, for Amanda, than God.
Ultimately, Maud’s belief reveals itself to be not just embarrassing, not just intolerant—but even, in the final accounting, disordered, a form of mental illness. After she’s cast out of Amanda’s house and fired from her job as a home nurse, Maud’s situation grows increasingly dire. The squalor in her apartment grows. She’s subjected to a variety of supernatural phenomena that might be hallucinations. Always talking to God, she begins to hear God’s voice talking back. And she subjects herself to horrific acts of self-harm, acts intended to bring her closer to God. She’s a danger to herself and others. What she needs is help, someone to pull her out of her downward spiral. What she gets instead are humiliating encounters with people who can’t see or don’t care how badly she’s hurting, a recommitment to her unhinged form of faith, and an accelerating spiral toward either beatification—or self-destruction.
I’ve often thought that the cult is one of the major organizing tropes of the times we live in—times where, to borrow a line from writer Patricia Lockwood, “A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.” The experience of losing a loved-one to an arcane and fanatical belief system, once a misery reserved only for those who lose family members to the kind of cults that end up on the news, is increasingly a phenomenon that can happen to anyone—anyone whose kids wander into a weird corner of the internet, whose friend starts following the wrong Facebook page, whose parents watch a little bit too much Fox News. People are constantly joining cults, it seems, falling into strange ways of believing and engaging with the world: flat earth, anti-vax, QAnon, white nationalism, incels, Trumpism; worldviews that, it must be said, have a more than casual relationship with American Christianity. Political commentators like to say we live in “bubbles,” but they could just as easily be cults: self-contained communities with their own truths, their own methods of engaging with reality, that look completely rational from the inside but appear to be self-evidently insane from the outside.
Embarrassing, bigoted, disordered—these descriptors for Maud’s faith increasingly feel like terms that could more broadly be applied to belief in general.
I say this in spite of the fact that I have been, and still am to some extent, a religious person—a believer, to use the parlance common in some quarters of Christianity. There’s no escaping it: a religious person is a person who believes. Yet from my childhood onward I remember feeling uneasy about my belief, embarrassed by it, nervous about being caught believing anything. Inside the bubble of belief, the community, it all made sense to me, but as soon as I stepped into the outside world the things we held as self-evidently true in church began to sound strange to me. To speak them aloud, I felt, would be shameful. To bow my head and pray at a restaurant with my family felt like a deeply humiliating act; to go even further, as my youth pastors demanded, and share my faith with strangers, to confess that I believed in a God-man who died and was raised to life for the salvation of the world, was completely unimaginable to me.
“I believe, help thou my unbelief”—this line from the Gospels, spoken by a man who wants Jesus to heal his child, held deep meaning for me in those days. I was supposed to believe, but I didn’t, not fully, and I wanted help with that; I wanted God to shove me all the way from doubt into unreserved belief, the way Maud pleads for God to come back to her as she kneels on a scattering of popcorn kernels on the floor, as she pushes her foot into a shoe she’s lined with nails.
The verse reads different to me today. Somewhere along the line I came to suspect that it might be better to hold one’s beliefs lightly, to believe and not believe at once, lest I fall from faith into fanaticism. When I heard a famous author say, on a podcast, that he tries hard not to believe things, it sounded not like weakness but like wisdom to me. Some of my own greatest failings in life have come when I was operating confidently out of my beliefs, my rigid ideas about the world—these moments were the ones in which I most failed, in retrospect, to see what the situation really required of me, failed to see the real human need all around me. In my belief, I brought something to the moment that was not needed, that was not even wanted—like Maud trying to convert her dying patient rather than simply comforting her in a time of sickness and pain.
These days I think it’s best to have some flexibility in belief. “I believe, help thou my unbelief” might be less a confession of a weakness requiring help than the description of an ideal state: believing, but also, not. It’s impossible to go through life without beliefs, I think, but still best to approach life with some flexibility, some openness to change, in case the quest to be a good human—which as I understand it is the purpose of religion in the first place—requires beliefs to be revised or abandoned entirely.
I remember vividly the day when my thinking on religious belief began to change. (This is a thing about me: most people remember things that happen; I remember things I think.) I was, somehow, in conversation with some seminary students of various Christian traditions, and the conversation turned, as conversations with seminarians often do, to theology. The question on the table was the nature of God. (I’m not even joking about this.) One of the seminarians argued that God is primarily a creator; another that God should be understood primarily as a living relationship; still another that God was fundamentally a judge, a bringer of justice. And this is going to sound goofy because what do any of those words mean, really—but the conversation got heated, each person arguing their viewpoint at the exclusion of the others. I mostly just listened.
There were a variety of ways to understand the situation, of course—there’s the anecdote, for instance, of the blind men and the elephant. But sitting there, listening to these seminarians paw blindly at some ineffable something, I suddenly began to doubt that there was even an elephant there. I wasn’t sure what we were talking about, actually. When you debate something that exists in the observable world, there’s a thing for you to point to, some object or phenomenon that you can check your claims against. But here, there was nothing. In fact, listening, I began to suspect that the object they were talking about was not God at all—but their own minds. The three seminarians were not talking about some transcendent divine reality; they were confessing, in theological language, the way reality appeared to them, due to some quirk of their psychology. Some crucial bit of neural wiring or some formative experience predisposed them to look at the world and see creativity, to see relationship, to see justice and injustice.
I slowly withdrew, leaving them to their arcane debates, realizing something for the first time: a lot of theology, more than religious people would like to admit, is in fact psychology.
So it is in Saint Maud. Maud’s God is a projection, a reflection of her interior states. She came to religion after something terrible happened in an old job at a hospital, a death she was somehow responsible for, and in the aftermath of that trauma, that shame, came her moment of conversion. In flashback we see Maud, in horror, press herself into the corner of the room, then look up to see a cockroach skitter across the ceiling—an unsettling, ambiguous visual suggesting Maud’s desire to be contained, to be held, and her simultaneous sense of some otherwordly visitation in her moment of need.
This is Maud’s God—not a real deity whose existence transcends her own mind, but a creation of her psychological need for connection, her deep existential loneliness. The supernatural phenomena that occur around and in her aren’t real, they’re hallucinations. And when God finally talks back to Maud, the director uses Morfydd Clark’s own voice, slowed down and speaking Welsh. Maud is literally speaking to herself.
Theology is psychology. God talk is self-talk.
And Maud’s God—that is to say, her own addled mind—is leading her toward destruction.
I don’t know precisely where I’m going with this. Like Maud, I’ve backed myself into a corner—a solipsistic one. I can’t say precisely where faith ends and fanaticism begins. I don’t know how to distinguish between a belief created fully by one’s own psychological baggage and one rooted in something true and separate from the subjective self. I am still, after everything, a believer. I think we all are, in something or other.
“I believe, help thou my unbelief!”—but here, at the end, I find myself thinking of a different line from the gospels: “The kingdom of God is within you.”
Jesus said that one, and I didn’t understand it when I was a kid. It didn’t make sense to me. What’s the point of a kingdom that’s within you? I always thought the kingdom of God would be on the outside, an observable reality of love and justice and peace. A world without pain. A world that was better than this one.
But maybe the point is that before we can make that world on the outside, we have to make it on the inside. That our religions, our beliefs, our theologies, say a lot more about us than they say about God. “The mind,” says John Milton’s Satan, “is its own place, and can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” The personal heaven or hell we live in—the heaven or hell of our own minds—inevitably becomes the reality we manifest in the world, in our interactions with others. Salvation or damnation begins with us. That’s the first battle—an internal one. Wrestling with ourselves.
If we really do all make a God in our own image, it’s important to make her a good one.
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