Paddy Mulholland
Oct 9, 20194 min
Baby steps for fledgling filmmakers! Hurling itself at the audience like a drunken fresher after a This Is Us binge, debut director Shannon Murphy's Babyteeth is an excruciating Aussie melodrama, full to the brim and fuller still of cringeworthy cliches across narrative, dialogue, character and style, practically falling over itself to announce each and every new affectation with a brash, unmistakably Antipodean obnoxiousness. Not to slander an entire continent, but here is not the subtlety of Jane Campion, nor the thoughtfulness of Peter Weir, nor the innovation of Peter Jackson. Here are the hokey ramblings of a pair of newbies, writing (Rita Kalnejais) and directing respectively, insistent on shoehorning all their worst ideas into a tired premise that could hardly bear the weight of one of them, let alone dozens. This suburban ensemble piece has the distinct timbre of all those American Beauty wannabes of the '00s (and indeed of American Beauty itself), crude and desperate and pointedly adolescent.
There's a real story, if not an especially original one, beneath all the performative pretentiousness, and when the cast has the chance to engage with it, rather than the risible dialogue, they prove their superiority to the rest of the movie and elevate it a little. We're familiar, to varying extents, to the talents of Ben Mendelsohn, Essie Davis and Eliza Scanlen, though fellow lead Toby Wallace will be less recognizable to most; he makes the strongest impression, overcoming a hopelessly hackneyed character with a full-bodied display of dramatic intuition that bursts off the screen. He achieves what Babyteeth as a whole evidently aspires to with its grand dramatic gestures, almost all of which have the opposite effect to their intention, draining credibility and setting the audience at a distance where all its flaws are egregiously visible. I hate to come down hard on women in film, particularly those just starting out, but I also hate this movie. I really hate this movie. I hate it so much I can't comprehend how anyone else likes it.
As the nights turn longer and the weather turns colder, here's a happy thought: at least things aren't as bad for you as they are for Maud. Poor Maud! Or, perhaps, that ought to be Saint Maud. As bad as they may be for her, however, her God has seen fit to take mercy on her and shield her from the pain she dares not waste. No, things aren't bad for poor Maud, they're wondrous and glorious for Saint Maud! The nonsensicality of religious faith expressed at its most extreme is given an almighty skewering in Rose Glass' vivid, graphic debut feature, Saint Maud, a psychological horror with the kind of startling physical manifestations that align it with some of the less excessive works of the New French Extremity (and there's a gratuitous, though effective bit of Bruno Dumont in here for good measure). Glass' distinctive first feature ought to earn her admirers both in cinephile circles and among broader audiences - this is hardly Avengers level commercial, but it's accessible enough to appeal to a wide range of viewers.
Maud works in private palliative care in a dingy British seaside town, dingier nowhere than her one-room flat, whose bareness suits her particular brand of punitive Christian faith. It's a personal brand, indeed, one involving an alarming degree of self-deprivation and punishment alongside a caustic, blackly comic sense of self-worth. We learn of Maud's distorted vision of the world, in her myopic view burdened down by a suffering it has no proper awareness how to embrace, through voiceover narration, the first indication in Saint Maud that Glass is embarking on an unusual tour through material that might otherwise seem familiar. The portentousness is not only leavened by the occasional, but generous, comedic aspects, it's complemented by it, and the pair combine the callous and the profane with the supposedly divine in a manner that better suggests the fundamentals of Christian faith than the majority of conventional cinematic depictions. Agony becomes sublime, joy becomes sinful, and Maud's inverted vision of life is rendered horribly, delectably real.
Physicality and spirituality are foregrounded in Glass' rigorous, though not overly frugal mise-en-scene, thus banishing intellectuality, putting an unexpectedly sentimental face onto a stark portrait within an extreme genre. Saint Maud thus attains its potency as a horror picture, aided enormously by Glass' astute touch with calibrating the requisite frights. Jump scares and gory flourishes may be par for the course in this genre, but they're rarely managed as finely and as successfully as they are here. And the actors are utterly fantastic, including Jennifer Ehle as a vain former dancer approaching the end of her life in defiant, albeit ignominious fashion, and Morfydd Clark as the titular carer-cum-heavenly body with severe mental health issues. She's riveting in a complex part, demanding major emotional shifts within a narrow register of overt displays, with Clark seemingly never unwilling to dive as hellishly deep as the script demands. Things are devastatingly bad for Maud, but she's convinced she's never had it so good.
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