Saint Maud

Rose Glass was not yet thirty when she made Saint Maud, her first feature, developed by Escape Plan Productions with money from Film4 and the BFI. It premiered in the Midnight Madness strand at Toronto in September 2019, was quickly picked up by A24 and StudioCanal, and received a special commendation in the Official Competition at the BFI London Film Festival, where the jury president, Wash Westmoreland, hailed a powerful new voice in British cinema. The pandemic then held it back for a year; it finally reached British cinemas in October 2020.

Morfydd Clark plays Maud, a private palliative-care nurse and recent convert to Catholicism, newly assigned to Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a former dancer and choreographer from America who is dying, embittered and afraid, in an English seaside town. Maud comes to believe that God has entrusted her with saving her patient's soul. Glass keeps the film tight to Maud's inner life and her solitude, and the town, shot in Scarborough and North London over five weeks, is as lonely as she is. Clark's performance is watchful and unnerving in equal measure, Ben Fordesman's cinematography pushes steadily towards the uncanny, and Adam Janota Bzowski's score works on the nerves beneath it.

Critics received it as one of the most assured British debuts in years; Mark Kermode named it his film of 2020. It earned a record seventeen nominations at the British Independent Film Awards, winning for Fordesman's cinematography and the Douglas Hickox Award for Glass, and two BAFTA nominations. In 2025 The Hollywood Reporter ranked it fifteenth among the best horror films of the century; Glass followed it with Love Lies Bleeding.