theaters before pandemic-related delays). “I knew the kind of film I wanted to make was very much set in someone's head,” Glass told Mashable in an April 2020 phone interview (back when Saint Maud was supposed to hit U.S. No, her very real devotion to God just goes, as Glass so diplomatically puts it, “to some messed up places.” Maud, played by the exquisite Morfydd Clark, isn't plagued by an otherworldly demonic presence. Instead, Glass reignites the “Catholicism, but make it spooky” subgenre with a twisted character study of a lonely nurse. “Now, if somebody says they hear the voice of God in their head, they get treated quite differently, don’t they?” But unlike so many of the "religious horror" films that came before it, Saint Maud doesn’t have its characters confront the devil or wage war on any unholy spirit.
Sure, writer-director Rose Glass revisits the same thematic ground broken decades ago by iconic titles, including Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen. A potential food shortage, an incident with a tiny interloper, and an unfortunate accident all push the family towards the one predictably inevitable event in a movie called Hidden… discovery.Saint Maud is unexpected, even by horror movie standards. In spite of their best efforts, the tension continues to mount. With personalizing touches like these, The Duffer Brothers weave a (more or less) successful vision of a stable, loving family trying to keep things together under extraordinary circumstances. “Stop calling me Zoe-Zoe! I’m not a baby anymore,” becomes a familiar refrain, in fact. While Zoe’s mother Claire comforts her daughter who’s plagued by nightmares about The Breathers, she’s also working on coming to terms with the idea that her little girl is growing up.
The father/daughter relationship between him and Zoe takes center stage and Skarsgård puts his heart into it. It’s during this claustrophobic-yet-kinda-cozy period that Alexander Skarsgård truly shines as the devoted father, Ray. And, by the time we meet our characters Ray, Claire, and their eight year old daughter, Zoe, they’ve been hiding underground for 301 days doing everything they can to avoid being found by “The Breathers.”Īs a well-crafted “slow burn”-style horror/thriller, the first half of the film concerns itself with getting to know the characters, observing the family dynamic, and seeing what life is like for them in their bomb shelter home. This virus “changes” anyone that it affects. Hidden - not to be confused with the Kyle MacLachlan/alien parasite fun-fest, The Hidden (1987) - centers around a small family who’ve escaped to the safety of an old fallout shelter while their once sleepy town of Kingsville, North Carolina is ravaged by some kind of viral outbreak. Prior to the Stranger Things explosion of 2016, however… I’m guessing most of us were chillin’ under that Duffer-less rock.Įverybody got their start somewhere, though! And for the Duffers it was a couple of short films followed by their debut feature-length project released in 2015, Hidden. With three seasons down and at least one more on the way for their monumentally popular 80s throwback Netflix series, Stranger Things (2016-), you’d have to have been living under a rock for the last few years to not have heard about The Duffer Brothers.
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