"Saint Maud" and "The Wolf House"

It took a while, but some prestige horror titles from overseas are finally available Stateside.

First there's "Saint Maud," the directing debut of Rose Glass. It stars Morfydd Clark as Maud, a soft-spoken hospice care nurse who is a recent Catholic convert. She is given a new assignment to care for a dying woman named Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a dancer and choreographer of some renown, who is also an atheist and a lesbian. Maud becomes obsessed with her, and the idea that she's meant to save Amanda's soul. Maud appears to be very passive and quiet, but we hear her thoughts in voiceover, detailing her gradual slide into religious mania and madness.

"Saint Maud" has quite a few horror movie antecedents, but her often fanciful visions of signs from God and Catholic iconography feel like something out of a fantasy movie. Though there are a few jump scares here and there, the horror really comes from Maud struggling with the widening gap between reality and her increasingly grandiose delusions. She feels the presence of God when she prays, which escalates to him speaking to her directly. In a moment of revelation, she appears to levitate like Saint Teresa. It's fascinating to piece together Maud's past. Encounters with an old friend, Joy (Lily Knight), reveal that Maud's name used to be Katie, and she suffered a trauma when she lost a patient, which may have lead to her conversion. Amanda wonders aloud if Maud's attempts to chase away her lover, Carol (Lily Frazer), are born of bigotry or jealousy.

Morfydd Clark's performance is the reason the film has the power and the poignancy that it does. She does a fantastic job of contrasting a meek facade with inner resolve, of getting across Maud's inner turmoil and moments of doubt while hardly moving a muscle. Her attempts to reach out to Amanda and to Joy are terrifically tense, because Clark plays those scenes with so much going on under the surface. And her experience of religious ecstasy in the final moments of the film are entancing. And then, thanks to Rose Glass, utterly gutting.


Now, on to one of the most unique and fascinating animated films ever made, "The Wolf House." Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña lead a group of Chilean artists who put together the feature as an evolving exhibition in a series of museums and art institutions across the world. Taking inspiration from a real Chilean commune known as the Colonia Dignidad, formed by fanatical German expats, and lead by a notorious pedophile, the film is conceived as a piece of sinister propaganda, loosely retelling "The Three Little Pigs." It follows a disobedient girl named Maria (Amalia Kassai) who runs away from the commune to live in a strange house with two pigs.

The house of the title forms the canvas for all the animation that appears, painted directly on the walls and on the floor, and any objects that happen to be present. Characters first appear in 2D form, and then manifest as 3D creations of masking tape and paper-mache, which are animated via stop-motion. Maria, the Wolf (Rainer Krause), and the two pigs, Pedro and Ana, are recreated anew in each scene, constantly being constructed and deconstructed, their forms changing from location to location. This is the most apparent with the pigs, who first grow hands and feet, and then slowly change into children as the story goes on. Forms are crude, often monstrous and nightmarish, but it's impossible to take your eyes off the screen. The whole feature is designed to look like a single long shot, where the camera moves through the various rooms of the ever-changing house.

Not having any knowledge of the film's origins, history, or anything that it was referencing, I found the story too abstracted, and too buried under layers of symbolism to be properly horrific. Aside from the Fascist underpinnings, the film felt more driven by dream logic than anything. However, as a feat of pure creativity, "The Wolf House" is a tour-de-force. I love the way that it combines all these different kinds of animation, and the way it references and quotes the work of many other animators, including Jan Svankmajer and Jiri Trnka. I love the way it uses reverse photography, found objects, and leaves so many imperfections and signs of its making in the frame, including glimpses of guidewires and armatures. This is easily the most original piece of animation I've seen in ages.

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