Fair warning, this is a slow-burn.
Maud’s story is tragic. She is a very lonely girl, sweet, full of faith, and mentally ill. That’s a recipe for disaster in her case.
Religion
What I really want to talk is the role of religion in this film. I’ve been on a bit of a bender these last few days watching movies that show the shadowy side of religion. It’s not all peaches and cream like what they’ll sell you in AA or Sunday School. Sometimes—perhaps often times—religion can be a vehicle for self-centred and ironically demonic behaviour.
So it is in the case of Maud. Within her own theological framework, what she’s doing is a good thing. She wants to save someone’s soul. But the path she takes to get there, feeling like she was chosen by God for this, ends in tragedy for all involved.
SPOILERS
The ending can be interpreted a few different ways. One way, which I would not personally subscribe to but which is nevertheless interesting, is that it was the Devil she was hearing, that caused her to murder her patient, and then kill herself.
However, the most likely case, I think, was that she was off her rocker on medication, solitude, and religious narratives that caused her to seize and hallucinate. In a way, this makes her a lot like Merricat in Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (which is also a slow read): both have their own religious framework that isolates them from others and drives them to make a series of poor and/or immoral decisions, including murder. Again, the dangers they both pose to others is ignored until the last possible minute.
Fools for Christ
The expression that stuck in my mind, which I picked up in books and such, is this exhortation for people being fools for Christ. Maud is clearly foolish. From our point of view as the viewer, her behaviour is problematic in a number of ways, not least because she worked to impose her spiritual values on someone else. Her religiosity was unable to engage with critique. She was deadly serious in her beliefs. She was certainly a fool for Christ, or willing to look like a fool because of her faith at any rate. Consequently, her outwards devotion to God was ironically narcissistic because it was beyond any rebuke or examination. It consumed her completely in such a way that it was all abut her and what she believed. Anything else was just her being tested, as when Amanda became demonic.
Perspective
I think this movie is a testament to the danger of having a narrative through which you live your life. The film shows us the world from Maud’s perspective, which is likely not totally accurate. How much was she really seeing? How much was really a revelation from God? To be honest, we can’t really know for sure, and I think this is deliberate. I’ve observed first-hand that the religious experience is fraught with agnosticism. People are always debating where God is calling them or their church, or what plan there might be for our lives. So much of it is shrouded in uncertainty, as much as for secular folk but with the added bonus of a religious narrative that acts as a kind of “one size fits all” for human meaning. Is not life more varied?
The perspective that is curiously ignored, because Maud was ignoring it, was that of Amanda, who was actually dying. When her death is imminent, what does she think of God, the afterlife, or even how she’d like to spend her last days? What mattered to her in life? We get some hints, of course, but largely in response to Maud’s religious views.