Attack of the Final Girls is a podcast about the horror genre so listener discretion is advised. Please check the show notes for specific content warnings for this episode. And of course, beware of spoilers. Welcome to Attack of the Final Girls. I'm Juliet. And I'm Teresa. And happy Easter Monday. Yeah, Easter Monday is a thing. Happy that.
Yeah, you're celebrating or not. It's weird. I always celebrated Easter as a kid, but like the fake kind of Easter, sort of like the same way that we celebrated Christmas. Like, you know, it's a holiday for religious reasons, but we never. like celebrated but like eggs and bunnies and stuff exactly yeah yeah like we always got an easter basket
Full of like junk food candy. Actually, the first time I ever lost a tooth, I was eating a chocolate bunny and it was like the kind that has the Rice Krispies in it. so i'm like chewing it and then there's this rice crispy that won't chew and i'm like what the hell and i spit it out and it's a tooth that's my god that was the first tooth i ever loved so
That's my Easter horror story. Wow. That's a good one. That is a good one. But like, I never went to church or anything like that for Easter. We just did Easter best. Yeah. And watch like the Ten Commandments, you know, because it was always on PBS. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That was always a thing. Also, I don't know if this happened to you guys, but in our neighborhood, well, all through Huber Heights.
There was like a video. No, we talked about this. The VHS tape, the Jesus VHS tape. Oh, yeah, we talked about that last time. Yeah, my dad sometimes would be like, you guys want to watch this instead of the six-hour epic that is... It's not really six hours, but however long Ten Commandments is, it feels like 30 hours. So for many, many years, and I think just as a ploy for her own piece, but I...
I feel like her soap operas were an exception to this rule. Like we would be like, oh, we're going to give up. TV, maybe not for Lent, but for Holy Week, except for the Ten Commandments. I feel like that was a thing that my mom was like, we should give up TV for Holy Week. But I feel like she still got to watch her soap operas. So maybe it was just my dad and I being forced to not watch The X-Files, which we were probably fairly salty about.
That's fair. You know, it's funny. I was actually listening to a podcast, a true crime podcast about this guy who was like secretly in the mob. yeah me and my firefighter but like they were he was a firefighter like that was his legit job and he was like
Yeah, we stopped working on Sundays because we couldn't watch X-Files together. I was like, that sounds like a Juliet thing. I'm not working on that day anymore so that I could watch this. Yeah, when they switch it from Fridays to Sundays, it just wrecked everybody's life. Man, although...
Friday, I feel like is a tough time for TV. I think that's why they switched it. Maybe less now, because like post pandemic, people's TV watching habits are a little different. But probably the thing that made me mad as a young person is that like, So it used to come on Sundays at nine, I think, like after Simpsons and whatever the fuck else was after the Simpsons at that given time.
But then if there was like football or an award show or the Super Bowl, then you'd have to wait till like freaking 11 o'clock on a school night to watch the X-Files. And it wasn't that my parents wouldn't let me watch it because they knew better than that. These are the same people that graciously let me stay up very, very late as a young child when they moved the Star Trek syndication to late at night instead of 7 p.m. It wasn't that. It was just I was like, I don't.
care about the Super Bowl and then like all the stuff they have to do afterward where they're just like analyzing the game I'm like We already saw the stupid game. We don't need to talk about the game anymore. I need Mulder and Scully. There's important alien shit going down. There's important alien shit. We all know Juliet needs her important alien shit. I do.
Or, you know, Supernatural in general. Honestly, the movie that we watched today could probably have been an X-Files episode. Absolutely. Yeah. There were a couple of like religious-y ones. So yeah, this could totally fit into the X-Files. I'm pretty sure there's one in like the first or second season where everybody's burnt up. But it might have been like spontaneous combustion. Yeah, it was. Okay. We said last time we were watching St. Maude, which is what we watched. Yes. Because it's like...
Easter times. Yeah, absolutely. And it's one that we both saw during pandemic times. This was one of many movies that was on the festival circuit in 2019. So it's technically a 2019 release. but was supposed to get a wide release in like early 2020. And then kind of got lost in the shuffle, I think was sent to streaming first. And then like... got a limited theatrical release when theaters were actually open, but a lot of people weren't going to theaters.
So this is one that I feel like a lot of people are still discovering. We were lucky enough to see it in the theater, but I haven't watched it since. So it was kind of fun to me. It's very much mired. Like the movie itself is intermingled with the experience of watching the movie, which felt like very weird and tentative. Like when we were doing like. Let's rent out a movie theater and watch a movie during pandemic times.
is this okay i guess it's okay and we were like as you said like the four of us were all like still masking around each other you know yeah so it was nice to revisit this one and kind of get to watch it without all of that like extra stuff contextualizing my experience. Yeah, it was weird. So like the three years of like primary pandemic times, I clearly have like mixed up in my head because I thought this one was one that we saw extremely early into the pandemic.
And it is not like having gone back through my extensive notes. We saw this one in February and we had seen a couple of movies towards the late summer and at the end of 2020. We had seen a couple in the theater where we had rented out the theater. And in this particular instance,
This was like one of the first ones that we went to Inglewood to see. So there's like a smaller theater that Juliet and her partner, their friend, had owned at the time yeah and so we were lucky enough to be able to rent out the entire place and and he would basically show whatever we wanted pretty sure that's how we saw psycho gore man too it was it was and part of the logic around that is
He was not getting a lot of business at the time, as were most theaters. And there were so many, it's a single screen. And so there were so many limitations on like how many people you could have. So we were... A couple of different times to help him out. Like, hey. Let us give you a chunk of money to rent the theater just for like the four of us just to help your bottom line too. Yeah. Yeah. Buy snacks and stuff. Yep.
He did do, he did do like popcorn to go. I remember that. He did that. Yeah. Yeah. That was a big thing. Because the big theaters weren't opening like at all for anything. Right. Yeah. I think all the smaller like the single screens in our area did like to go popcorn because they were. small enough and used to, I think, very small staffing so that one person could come in or two people could come in and distance and handle the to-go popcorn. Yeah, it was nice. It was a nice experience.
And, you know, this movie had just recently been kind of released so that you could see it at all. Right. And there had been a lot of hype about it at the end of 2019. But see. My memories of the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 are basically obliterated and not real. Same. Like time was not real then. Dude, like when I think back to like the end of 2019 and early 2020, I'm like... We were playing Vampire the Masquerade. Oh my God. Forgot about that. I went to DC.
And then lockdown happened. Yeah. Like that's literally all I remember is like we were doing that game weekly. I went to DC for training. And was like on the flight there feeling totally fine. And by the time the flight back happened, I was a nervous wreck because I was like. Oh my God, this is happening. Got back, had one week of work, and we went to an escape room. Yep. And then lockdown happened. Yep.
That escape room and then dinner afterwards. I don't know if you went to dinner afterwards. I did. The restaurant was empty. Yeah. There was nobody there. It was. So dystopian and weird. I think it was for our DM's birthday. It was wild. Yeah. I just remember like actually wondering. if it was okay to go and then just being like,
fuck it, this is probably the last thing we're going to get to do in a really long time. And that was accurate. That literally was. Yeah. It's weird when you have like these thoughts in your head of a thing that happens and you're like, shit's never going to be the same after that. And it was like something that happened so acutely to everybody that it feels so much stronger in like magnitude. But I don't have like clear memories of basically like April through November of 2020 like
Our partners were home. We were working from home. We were trying to figure out a new normal and not murder everybody in the vicinity. It's true. It's true. And not like, be like, oh, my God, I can't stand being in this room with this person for this long. You know, go to a restaurant. Yeah. Or like just do something outside the house. Wild times. Yeah. I mean, so many of my memories from like after like lockdown started.
are just like blurs of me sitting at my desk upstairs, like in my home office. Yeah. Like it's like, oh, yeah, sometimes like my cat was there. Sometimes my partner would wander upstairs and I'd get annoyed or, you know, like, but it's all just like. My entire life was just in that room.
All the time. Same. It literally in this room that we're in right now. Yeah. Watching Sex and the City because I had never watched it before. Yeah. There was a lot of TV that got watched. Anyways, waxing poetic about the wild times that were the beginning years of the pandemic. But yeah, so we saw this in February of 2021. We saw it in the theater all by ourselves. It was just the four of us. And I really didn't have any idea of what to expect.
Because still at this time, people weren't really going to see movies or like talking about them very much. Yeah. So there had been a lot of hype post-TIFF. But then afterwards, like, it was kind of like... what the hell what's going on with this one and i don't think anybody we knew had seen No, definitely not. So we hadn't heard anything. It was also Rose Glass's directorial debut. So like she was very new to the scene. We know her now both for this movie and for Love Lies Bleeding and like...
You know, obviously with these two movies under her belt, she is like well on her way to being like, you know, a great voice in cinema, but she was. at least in the US and on the horror scene, pretty much an unknown at that point. And Tiff was really kind of her breakout moment.
Even if I didn't know anything about the movie, if they were like, oh, it's a Rose Glass movie, I'd be like, yup, I'm in. But back then it was just like, okay, there's this new movie from this unknown director. It's A24, you know, like. It's going to be weird and we'll probably like it. That's all I knew. Yeah, exactly. And and also like this was before we had sort of like a glut of religious horror that happened sort of all at the same time. And we were like.
Can we like get any movies that aren't possession movies there for a while? It was just like a lot of them, you know? Well, and this is definitely a different take on religious horror. True. Very true. Not a possession movie. No, not at all. You know, there were so many like The Nun and, you know, like real heavy, hardcore, like deep in it.
And then we had, you know, the omen. Yeah. The first omen. Yeah. The one that did it right. Yeah. So like there were so many there that happened like one right after the other. And it almost got to the point where you're like, oh, this is exhausting. You know, I'm like sick of it. And being a religious horror movie, which this one is, there's no scripture in this movie. Right. In the entire movie. Yeah. There's no priests. Yeah, there's no priests.
There's no like religious figures. Yeah. It's called St. Maude. And you could argue, I think, that she canonizes herself. But yeah, like. It is a movie that does not exist in a church. Right. There's no like trappings of Catholicism in this movie. It's just. one woman and like her relationship with religion yeah no scripture she doesn't even have like a bible she doesn't bust out a bible and like read it or anything no she says prayers but that's it yeah
It's interesting. It is interesting. Before we dive in let's go over the cast really fast. kind of two main actors in this movie, Morfeth Clark, who plays Maude, And then Jennifer Ely, who plays Amanda. I mean, there are other people in the movie, but those are the two main characters that the whole crux of the story centers around. And you might know Morfeth Clark. Now she's played Galadriel in the Rings of Power show.
And OK, so when we saw this movie, I thought Jennifer Ely was friggin Meryl Streep. She kind of looks like Meryl Streep. Yes. And the whole time I was like, what the hell? And I knew that I knew her even after I found out that she's not Meryl Streep. She plays Elizabeth Bennett in my favorite iteration of Pride and Prejudice. She plays Elizabeth Bennett in the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, which is my ultimate favorite.
And so the whole time I'm like, I can't place her. Who is this person? And then I'm like, oh, this totally different, like very, very, very different person. Also, she's British. And in this movie, she's playing an American. So that also kind of threw me off a little bit. So like the premise of the movie is that Maud is a carer. She's a palliative carer. And she is taking care of Amanda, who is a former dancer who has terminal cancer.
So Maude is taking care of her while also having sort of this like intense religious journey within herself and also trying to impart it on this person who's very close to death. It's wild. It's like, oh, yeah, it's a wild ride. Yeah. Because Maude is like very strongly convicted, very stern. But, you know, she cares. She does. care about the person that she's taking care of but she's also like
At first, it's not on purpose that she starts to introduce her religion to Amanda and include her in the prayers and things like that. But... It ends up happening that she gets very wrapped up religiously in saving Amanda's soul prior to her death. And she's thinking like, this is my calling. This is the thing I must do. And Amanda having been... a creative type, as Maude calls her early in the movie, is, you know... kind of caught between this like, yes, I'm in the middle of dying and
I'm not long for this world, but also like I want to feel the things that I used to be able to feel for as long as I can. Yeah. I want to have romantic experiences and intimate experiences with people. I want to have celebrations and mods very much like. you must concentrate on saving your soul. Yes. And there is no room for frivolity because this is life and death. Yeah. So interesting movie. It also starts out.
in a way that if you didn't know it was horror you could very much be like oh this is like a drama Yeah, absolutely. So we know some but not a lot about Maude's background. Throughout the movie, we get these little chunks and pieces. What we do know right from the get is that... Maude had been a hospital nurse and had tried to save a patient and was unsuccessful.
And that led to her making some radical life changes. You know, she stepped away from being a hospital nurse and went to go to be a private carer. She converted to Catholicism at some point, presumably after this event. And at first it just sounds like, you know, okay, she was burnt out. She needed a change in life. She had this thing happen and it triggered, you know, a desire to make a change.
However, throughout the movie, we learn more and more, especially from a former colleague who is trying to reach out in friendship. It sounds like Maude had a pretty... severe kind of breakdown or has a lot of trauma attached to this patient dying. We also find out that Maude used to be a person who went out and partied and it doesn't even seem like to excess like she was just
kind of a normal person with a social life, and now has completely rejected all of that. And very interesting that her saint, her chosen saint, is Mary Magdalene, who was... Not to get off on a Catholic tangent here. is sort of believed to be, per the Bible, a sex worker who then became a follower of Jesus. Now, a lot of people will say she was a sex worker who then repented. But choose your own adventure on that one. I choose to believe that that is more about...
Hippie Jesus saying, yo, sex workers are fine. Like, you know, you can be a follower and a sex worker. But a lot of people like to twist that Mary Magdalene story and say. She was a sex worker and then she met Jesus and then she, you know. air quotes, was redeemed and wasn't a sex worker anymore because God. You know, but that's obviously the sort of line of belief that Maude is following here too. And she actually changed her name too. Yes. Her name was Katie and then she changed it to Maude.
Which I, interestingly enough, found out that there is really a Saint Maude, which, like, not surprising. And that she took care of the sick. Yes. I know literally nothing else about it because, like... With all saints, there is so much that you can tap into with that. There is so much literature. And I was like, I'm not going to do that. This is not the time for me to do a deep dive on a saint.
What is also interesting to me is that Maude Katie slash Maude's introduction into Catholicism Rather than being about community and surrounding yourself with other people who are like-minded, other people who see themselves as lost and trying to find their way. She goes the opposite direction and she very intensely is introspective and close guarded about her own religion.
I'm very curious about the whole conversion thing too. What I would like to know background wise is, did she actually do all the steps or did she just decide she was Catholic? Yeah. Yeah. Because like she never goes to church. No. You know, and and she never talks about she never talks about church. She never talks about her conversion experience, which in Catholicism is a very communal experience.
You have to have a sponsor. Like, who's her sponsor? So I wonder if this was a formal conversion or if she just... decided these things for herself especially as a recent convert she never seems concerned with like communion or like having amanda anointed because there's a it's a sacrament actually the anointing of the sick um especially for people who are dying and ma is never like
hey, let's call a priest or even like, hey, I'm going to do this thing for you. And like the sort of formal trappings are not there. Yeah. She's very much guided by what she says is the voice of God, like inside herself. She'll do a thing and she says she feels him inside of her giving her pleasure, which from an outside perspective looks very much like sexual pleasure to her as we see her experiencing it.
It's very like internal, the journey that she's going on. And it very much seems like she just decided that she was going to, she's like, you know what? And she never really says that she's Catholic either. She just says, you know, she just says like, I, you know, God, but Mary Magdalene and like wearing the cross and having the cross on the wall and things like that.
Kind of give us, lend us to understand that it's supposed to be sort of a version of Catholicism. The other thing is that whether it's accurate or not, portrayals of intense religion. are most of the time Catholic in movies.
as we get further into the movie some of the practices are like arcane catholic practices like the um spugnam the thing she puts in her shoe like that's like an old right yeah weirdo catholic thing they do that in the da Vinci code yeah the cellist he has the cellist on his leg yeah it says she gets she got her saint medal online yeah okay that's how I got mine too I'm I'm no I'm just kidding
It does seem very much like a choose your own adventure type thing where she's like sort of pulling like the things that she wants out of the religion or things that she's like divinely told out of the religion. And the other thing is like. She does, you know, self-immolate in the movie, which is something like we're meant to understand is like her trying to. get closer to god and also become a saint yeah you know she thinks that she has like save
So now she needs to, you know, die in this holy way, sacrifice herself. Yeah. And also save all of the people who are watching. Oh, yeah. Because she has this like total vision. But anyways, I don't want to skip to the end too early on. I did really find it interesting that At the beginning of the movie, we have this scene of Maude having accidentally killed this woman.
And the woman is like kind of half hanging off of the gurney and her hair is sort of like down onto the ground. There are many instances in the movie where we repeat that same sort of positioning. Yes. with either Maude or with Amanda. And I thought that was really interesting. And it's sort of something that you would see in like Renaissance paintings to sort of like the woman half hanging off or the person half hanging off with their hair sort of like on the floor.
But I thought that was really interesting use of imagery throughout the movie. Absolutely. Yeah. I think in general, the choice to make Amanda a dancer was so wise because you can get it so much with like... the body in this movie. And there's so much good imagery, especially with modern dance, that can be expressive and disturbing and haunting and... almost spiritual, all in one that can mimic some of those like
iconic religious poses that we see in artwork, especially from the Renaissance era. I love that choice. I love just the way this movie treats the body. Because like by and large, save for a couple of scenes, it's not body horror. Like, I wouldn't categorize this movie as body horror, but it's very concerned with the body, you know, with like, this sort of dichotomy between Maud and... Amanda, where like Maude is almost trying to transcend her body, whereas Amanda is very comfortable.
In her body and wants to kind of keep her body, like lives a very embodied experience and her concerns about. impending death have to do with kind of leaving that body, you know, for
whatever might be next or nothing, you know, sort of like, how is she a being outside of a body, which makes sense for a dancer. Yeah. And in every aspect, Maude is you know her apartment is basically a room she doesn't appear to have much of a bathroom yeah you know like she has very few belongings very plain dressed with like utility in mind always
And that's it. You know, she's very much like I don't care about my body. In fact, there are many instances when she has like her quote unquote diary entries where she describes that she's having stomach pain. which like we never really find out what exactly that is. But she's like having the stomach pain or she's having a headache or she's menstruating or whatever, but she's like very factual, like not concerned about that, mostly just concerned about like.
how do I get this pain to go away so that I can put my entire focus towards God and serving God? Yeah. Which is, it is very interesting. Yeah. And I agree with you. I don't think it's really body horror. It's more like psychological horror than anything else. There are a couple of things where you're like, ooh. Yeah. Like the tacks in her shoe, like gross. Yeah.
and one other scene but it definitely doesn't strike me as body horror no no i think you can have a scene of a movie that is like oh god and then the rest of it not be body horror right because that's not the crux of the whole thing yeah you know it's just a part of the storytelling right it's like the thing that you know made her be the way that she is yeah Which is funny because actually we can just talk about that now, I would say. Yeah. So like the inciting incident.
is that when Maude is trying to save this woman at the hospital, she is performing CPR and breaks the woman's ribs and her hands end up going into the person's chest. to be too graphic, but that is a fairly common occurrence during intense CPR, especially for somebody who's older. CPR is not. It's not a kind or pretty thing. And it is extremely hard to recover from, which is why some people say that they don't want to be resuscitated. Yes.
It's not just like artificial resuscitation or like, you know, I don't want oxygen. It's I don't want to go through the traumatic experience of CPR. And there's actually a TV show that kind of revolves around one of these traumatic experience like that. called The Sinner with Bill Pullman and Jessica Biel. It was actually produced by Jessica Biel. And there are multiple seasons of it, but the first one ends up revolving around a very traumatic.
cpr experience interesting although that's like not the root of it there are other many many other layers to it but just interesting that that's something like a commonality that's very interesting considering it's called the center also i will say that As an American who is very, very, very, as we both are, very intimately familiar with palliative care in the United States, palliative care in Europe looks... A thousand times different. Oh, my God. Yes.
It's very different. And also this lady's rich. So like Amanda's rich. Absolutely. Yes. But it's very different. Very, very different. Just even the approach to it is just like wildly different. Like, yeah, we're going to do yoga. uh yeah okay nobody and like to be fair I'm not knocking hospice nurses because holy crap like yeah absolutely like they're angels but
That is not a part of practice in the United States when it comes to hospice care. Hospice care is more like, how do I make you not have pain? Right. And how do I honor the wishes for how you want to go? It's very starkly different. It is. Also, like, just nursing in general in Europe or in England looks very different than it does here. I agree. Knowing several nurses, the whole vibe of it feels very, very different.
Yeah. And I don't know if that's by way of like focus is different because as a carer. Maud is supposed to cook food and do laundry, but also administer medication and do these exercises and stuff, which here we sort of striate the care. So the STNA who's like doing bathing and showering and laundry is not the same person that would be administering medications and stuff like that. Yeah.
And I don't know if that's just like the training, the way that people come up in training there is just way different or. Well, it probably also unfortunately has to do with the billing here. you know like the fact that you have all of these professionals who are you know at a rate that your insurance company gets to decide how much they get paid and how much you're paying for each of these different skill sets and that's just not
done the same way in a place that has socialized medicine. You know, it's all part of the care that a person has the right to receive. So true. So true. I remember when my dad was still living at home and the STNA who would come for a couple hours a week every week. Like the billing for that, because we had to sign off on it, the billing was like, they billed Medicare like $16 an hour. And that person is definitely not making that $16 because the company has overhead too. And I was like,
So you mean to come and like bathe people and like do their laundry and cook their food and clean their houses and stuff. You're paying somebody like $11, $12 an hour. Not only that, they had to drive themselves. I remember lots of times the girl who worked for us there at the end.
before he went into the long-term care facility she didn't have a car so she was like constantly hustling trying to find somebody to take her in or like take an uber and then she'd have to leverage like am i gonna make enough today in order to cover my uber and all this shit and i was like I hate it. I hate it all. Maude did have to schlep up like a thousand stairs though to get to this lady's house. Yeah.
But also the very, very small UK town looked very walkable. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's like a rainy, drizzly fishing town. Yeah. They have like a Coney Island, which I did like that kind of juxtaposition. It's very sort of dreary. At least it's portrayed that way in film. Yeah. This like dreary sleepy town and Maude like kind of shits on it sometimes when she's talking about it. Like, you know, why did Amanda come back here? Blah, blah, blah.
But they have this like gaudy Coney Island face, you know, like on the front of it. And I kind of like that juxtaposition. Reminded me of...
Requiem for a Dream. Yeah. Because there's Coney Island and Requiem for a Dream. Although that's set in New York, obviously. Well, and it's a good contrast because by and large, like the colors in this movie are very... muted and subdued like we do get a contrast between mods more like beige based like pastel based but still muted world and then amanda's house and world is definitely more sumptuous like rich colors but they're still very like dull and muted like everything is shot like
very, very muted. The colors aren't popping except for like those Coney Island like marquees and some of the neon signs. Like nothing is popping out. Everything feels very like drab. Yeah. Even when Maude goes out, to like have a night on the town it seems awful oh yeah it just seems like very dreary and drab that whole scene oh yeah it's a rough scene
It is a rough scene. I think, too, like the lighting in this movie is extremely interesting. Yeah. Especially being about a person who's like, you know, traveling through life with the Lord, quote unquote. sort of the times when she pops in and out of light is very like beautiful and interesting to me. Amanda is getting ready to have a gentleman caller and she like puts on, you know, Maude is walking past the room. She's trying to leave.
And Amanda's like, hey, wait a second. And it's all dark in the hallway, but Maude like pops her head back and she's like bathed in this light. And there's another scene when she's asking Amanda's friend, the female friend that comes over and Carol. Yeah. That moment right before she asks her to stop coming over and she comes down the stairs. She's like waiting at the top of the stairs and then she comes down the stairs.
Her face is in light at the top of the stair landing. But as she's walking down the stairs, it's totally dark because she's backlit from that window. And then when she gets down to the bottom of the staircase, she gets the light from the kitchen on her again. And I'm just like, oh, it's just masterful to see that, like, the way that the movie is lit. And it's not artificial light. You know, this is like her just existing in this world and through this house.
naturally lit i think that rose glass captures that really really well yeah one of the other things i really like about this movie is that Our two main characters, Maude and Amanda, neither one of them is entirely good or evil. I know that for some people that is hard because, you know, you want like a clear cut, like good guy and bad guy. But I love the complicated nuance of each of the characters. Like each of them are...
grappling with things in their lives and they try to show acts of kindness. They're also both very selfish in moments. They're both kind of doing what they think is the right thing in any given moment. They're screwing up. They're apologizing. I really, really like that. It would have been easy to make Maude seem too much like a victim. And for Amanda to be too much.
like, this callous, uncaring person. But she repeatedly shows these moments of kindness where you can see, like, she's dealing with some shit, you know? She's confronting the end of her life and really trying to grapple with that. And also, like... have fun and find joy and sometimes she does that while hurting other people and she recognizes that and I really I just like that nuance in the characters I think having complicated characters like that
really elevates this movie. The thing I found most fascinating is that by putting Amanda in the position of being at the end of her life because Not because she's old, but because she is sick with cancer and her life is ending early. She's only 49. Yeah.
that we are in a unique position also she's alone in life yes she doesn't seem to have a husband she doesn't have family no children or anything like that but she did have a very successful career So we're in this unique position where we come to understand and accept
that she's going to be a bitch sometimes. Right. And we sort of set the stage that she's a bitch too, because the nurse that's leaving tells Maude like she's a bit of a cunt. Yeah. Which is like, you know, I hate saying that word myself, but like. In England, it's not a big deal. But we're in this unique position where we're like, yeah, she's a bitch, but also...
She's 49 and she's dying. And there's so much left out of life that she's not going to get to partake in. And she had this incredible career and she's got all this money and it's not going to save her. And so we accept that. And we're like, oh, yeah, well, I'd probably be a bitch, too. Would I be a bitch all the time? No. And she's not either. She's, you know, kind.
She's hard on Maude sometimes and then easy others. She humiliates her at this party and then she says, I'm sorry. Yeah. And then Maude gets fired, obviously. But it's a unique situation because if Amanda had been at the end of her life... If she had been like 80. Right. And she's not dying of cancer. She's dying of old age. And she's having to experience those things. Or maybe if she had had children that she was mean to or a family that she had been rude to.
then we would be like, oh, well, she's terrible. She's a bitch. Right, right. But- we have a unique character also a character that still has the capacity for care and love because she does care for carol yeah and she does want affection and she does you know soften towards maude at a certain point because And she admits later, like, it's so dull, but dying. Yeah. She's all by herself most of the time. Yeah. And she's having to experience this in her body.
by herself like nobody can help her with that and especially too she seems like we we get the sense especially from the party scene that she is someone who before her illness was accustomed to being surrounded by people and interesting people you know the folks at the party you can kind of like imagine for yourself they all seem like artists or writers, people who are very interesting, that enjoy each other's company.
And she doesn't have that anymore. Somebody who was a dancer and a choreographer probably could have chosen to spend every night out and about with very interesting people doing interesting things. And now she's... sitting at home most of the time by herself. And she's also used to being the center of the party. Yes. Not because she's sick, but because she's vibrant and interesting and beautiful.
And now she is sort of like on the other side of the coin, you know, weak, not able to keep up. Yeah. The center of attention because she's sick. You know, Amanda is almost a more interesting character than Maude because she is so three dimensional. Yeah, definitely. Maude is like very two dimensional. On purpose, though, like she's supposed to be like one side of the coin mod as the religious.
worker of God. And on the other side of the coin, sloppy, dealing with a traumatic incident. And not just that, Joy lets us in, her friend that she used to work with, Joy lets us know that Katie was struggling before that incident in the first place. Yeah. That was just like the thing that kind of broke her brain. Yeah. And I mean, who... Who could criticize Maude for wanting to go and like try and seek something bigger? Absolutely. After something like that happening. Yeah. And like.
I think too, if I understand properly, Joy gets mods... I think Maud lived in this sort of like room before all that happened. It seems like it. Yeah. She's broke. She lives in like this place that she doesn't like. Yeah. And. But she's like struggling and she uses that sort of like cloak of Catholicism to like strengthen herself and be like, that stuff doesn't matter. I have bigger fish to fry.
you know, towards the, I would say the middle of the movie when she slaps Amanda and gets fired, we can see like one little thing happens, one little chink in the armor, and then she fully is. kind of falling back on her old way. So this brings me to a big question, a question I had the first time we saw this movie, and I continue to have because I feel like the movie really could go either way and teases it, is mod queer.
That is an interesting question. I think that we talked about this a little bit when we first saw the movie The only times that we see her having moments of pleasure is when she's with Amanda or when she's like filled with the Holy Spirit. So it's hard for me to say that she's queer more than she only feels pleasure.
when she thinks that it's from God. That's fair. Yeah, that's a fair assessment. Which I don't want to say is asexual, because that's not asexual necessarily. Right, right. But it's more like... But it's a good question, because obviously, like later in the movie, when she's with that guy, she's like not having any sort of pleasure. In fact, like that moment, and it could be positioning, but I also think it's partially mental.
She has fallen so far in that moment that she ends up seeing... the traumatic experience which we see and we're like oh god yeah that scene is rough and it like it sort of like messes up you know what she's doing with this guy too but it doesn't seem it seems like Being in that moment takes her back to something that's really traumatic.
Like, is she asexual? Is she queer? That's a it's a great question. Yeah, I don't think the movie ever gives us a clear answer about that because several times Carol. kind of calls her out on, well, you're just telling me to leave because you're homophobic. And Carol draws the kind of natural conclusion. Well, you're this hyper-religious person, therefore you must be homophobic.
Fair or unfair is a natural conclusion to go to. And Maude kind of says, no, it's not about that. It's about God. And yet you see her in these moments and you're like, are you masking God for? an attraction to this person that you you don't understand and you don't have language outside of god to sort of put to it for yourself like you understand that there are like
queer people out there in the world, but you've never recognized that that's an option for you. So your brain just like can't compute it. I don't know. This is putting a lot of analysis into this character. No, that's fair. That's fair. That's an interesting, interesting thought there. I just think of Maud as like totally not sexual. Yeah. And that's.
a distinct possibility as well. Yeah. I also really appreciate the idea in this movie and it happens a lot in film of mental health help being too little too late. Yeah. Like in the last third of the movie, when Maude has sort of had her, she has a religious, like a holy experience two times. So she goes out and parties and drinks way too much. And then she has a sexual experience with this guy who humiliates her afterwards. And she goes home.
wow, I feel so low, like help me God, help, you know, whatever it is. And then she gets sick and sort of like has this levitation experience where there's like fireworks and water is dripping uncontrollably out of her sink. And after that, the morning after, she hears God speak to her at her altar, which she has in her room.
And then she kind of is like, OK, well, I have this like holy mission that I have to do. So she starts to put it into practice. And then Joy comes over, you know, and kind of derails it and says like. we all should have stepped in we're like I'm sorry that we didn't do that I we could tell that you had been struggling for a while we should have taken up for you we know that you put a lot of pressure on yourself and it wasn't all your fault it wasn't your fault and I hope you know that too
But it's sort of like falling on deaf ears because Maude's looking out and she's seeing like the clouds swirl, which to her is a sign from God, because at the bar she had seen the beer swirling. Yeah. It's too little too late. Like she's already been launched on this path. of you know holy mission she can't
hear when somebody is reaching out to her and saying like, hey, let me help you. Well, likewise, the conversation with Esther, the other nurse, Amanda's new nurse that Maude kind of stalks and kind of... you know, sets up this chance meeting with her as she's eating lunch on a bench. Esther provides this kind of alternative. Like, you know, she's in the exact same role as Maude, but she seems to have a healthier balance. You know, she understands.
Very astutely, like, you know, this is an important role. It's an opportunity to form a relationship with the people that you're caring for.
But also, ultimately, we are in palliative care and these people are going to die. And that's the way it is. And you have to sort of... understand that that's part of the job and it can be simultaneously meaningful but not all absorbing like esther seems to understand like there is a sort of and I say this in a non-religious sense, a sacred part of this work, but it is also the job that she has chosen to do and it is work and it is not.
The problem that Maude is having is that she doesn't have that separation, but that conversation comes so late in the movie. Maude has already decided what she's going to do and can't hear. Like this example that's right before her. Yeah. She's pissed. Yeah. Like she's upset when she has this conversation with Esther. She leaves without telling her her name because she's so mad that Esther has. kind of shown her the example of like a healthy work-life relationship.
And Esther's like, oh, you know, I've got my own things, choir practice, you know, I've got my own life or whatever. And then there's a part where Esther's like, yeah, you know, you have to prepare yourself for the end. And then Maud's like, oh, when you leave? And Esther's like, no, when they die. Which is wild to me that they're like...
That is the moment when Maude gets pissed. Right. Is when she volunteers like, oh, this time when they're... they when we leave and it's like no like when the relationship terminates it's like when they die She just doesn't even see that. Right. And maybe it's to her like, well, death is not the end or what have you. Sure. Because she's concerned with their like immortal soul.
But it's also very interesting to look back at her choices from, so like at that moment, knowing what we know about Maud, to look back at her choices and rather than... After this terrible instance when she's working in a hospital and trying to resuscitate somebody who normally when resuscitation happens and it seemed like this woman wasn't like.
old very old she was doing life-saving work rather than like palliative work at that time right that when that happened rather than freaking out and deciding i'm not going to be a nurse at all anymore right she doubles down and becomes a live-in carer for the dying. Yeah. Interesting that she would go that way. Right. Absolutely. Rather than being like.
I am going to go work at a fish and chip shop. That's exactly what I was going to say. Like, rather than be like, fuck it, I'm making sandwiches for a living, you know. Or doing nothing and drawing on the dole. Because that is also a thing that you can do.
She doesn't. She like really triples down on that and decides like, no, I need to I still need to work. And clearly she's like, I don't know if she's saving all of the money or what's happening, but she's not making very much because she's living like. hand to mouth basically yeah it's It's a very interesting way of and like, I'm not saying that I would not do that because I know myself and I might be like, well, I'm going to freak out and just do the thing harder. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
as a Virgo yep yep um So I love a movie where you do not know if what we're being shown is what's really happening. Absolutely. Yes. This movie is great for that. So the last third of the movie, we've gotten this sort of like come up of Maude being like, I have this holy mission of trying one last time to save Amanda. So she goes to do that. She has two things that she's left to do, one of which is going to see Amanda.
She dresses in her saint outfit, which is her sheet in a rosary. And she goes to her house and decides that she's going to have this conversation with her and then put the holy water on her forehead. I don't know what that's called. but like a blessing yeah she's like her yeah she's trying to bless her And then shit gets wild. Chaos ensues at that point. Yes, absolutely. But we don't know. We know at the end of the encounter that Maude has killed Amanda. Yes.
What we don't know, what we are never given clear insight, you know, you could be of the thought like, well, what we saw in camera has to be real because we can't assume that everything that doesn't happen on camera is real. You could go that way or you could say like Maud is incensed at this point, you know, with this like mission from God. So maybe it didn't happen, but.
Ma's having this conversation with Amanda. They're sort of like really getting to the root of things, like very raw, very emotional and vulnerable conversation. And Amanda, you know, Maud's basically like, let me, you know, bless you with this holy water. And we can hear it hiss on her forehead. And then Amanda starts to be. very terrible to Maude and say like these sort of more hurtful things. Maude starts to cry.
Amanda turns into a demon. Right. Or Satan. It could be also Satan. One or both. One or both. Evil thing. She turns into an evil thing. Yeah. And Maude stabs her to death with scissors. But we don't know if that really happened or if Amanda was really possessed or if she is just a regular person and Maude got upset and stabbed her. Yeah. Well, I mean, that is like literally the whole movie, you know, even with the ending, which we can talk about here in a second, is the whole time.
You're like, is this all in Maude's head? Like, is this a person sinking deeper and deeper into a delusional dissociative state? Or is she actually hearing something? That I would argue is probably not the voice of God. If you want to get into like traditional sort of portrayals of Satan, Satan imitates God. Satan is a great liar. Like the voice that she hears in her apartment that's speaking Welsh to her. Is that God? Is that?
Satan? Is that in her head? We don't know. And I would even argue, some people will say that the very end, that flashing at the very end, clarifies that everything has been in Maude's head. I disagree because... Was it all in her head? Was that showing reality? Or was that showing her soul burning in hell for everything she has done? Ooh, interesting. Yeah. Okay.
So, you know, after Maude's done this, she's covered in blood. She goes home. This is an interesting bit, too. She doesn't immediately go to do her last duty afterwards. She goes home, cleans up, goes to bed. Yep, falls asleep. And then the following day goes to the beach where she's to do her final task. where she wears her saint outfit again and covers herself in acetone and lights herself on fire. And in her head...
She sees herself as this angel. All of the people before her are falling to their knees with the image of her, you know, burning in front of them. And, you know, she's like... you know beatified she's you know yeah beaming and and full of the holy spirit and glowing and all this stuff and then there's a snap cut like just this like brief maybe a second probably less of her burning and screaming. Yeah.
So that's a good question. Is that her burning in hell? Is that reality and what everybody is seeing? What is that? Yeah, because a lot of people that write about this movie will say that that last scene is we switch from Maude's perspective, her delusional state back to reality. But I'm like, but is it? Is it? I mean, it could be.
If you grew up Catholic and you're obsessed with this stuff, it could be something else. And I didn't. So like, I'm sure that there is some stuff that I have missed in this movie, like in terms of like symbolism or whatever. But I like that it's accessible and understandable to people who are not. I completely agree. And actually, I think it is smart that they're a little more subtle in their imagery, kind of that glut of Catholic movies that we've been talking about.
I feel like sometimes are very on the nose with like, we're going to put in all of like the Catholic stuff. So you know that it's Catholic stuff, you know, so you understand what we're dealing with. And actually, I think this movie does a lot better job with being subtle in its imagery, both by being more accessible and also just like little things like the whole fire thing is a whole Holy Spirit Pentecostal reference.
which is great. But you don't need to know that to understand what's happening in the movie. Yeah. I would be interested to hear about Rose Glass's relationship with religion. I would too. Yeah, very much so. The only other movie I've seen from her is Love, Life is Bleeding, and that one is decidedly... Completely non-religious. Unless your religion is muscle mommies, in which case. I mean, amen. Okay, so next time we are going to be...
paying tribute to the late, great Val Kilmer and also doing a movie that I love for probably all the wrong reasons. I mean, story of our lives. Oh, it's so delightfully weird. the 1996 Island of Dr. Moreau, starring Val Kilmer, Marlon Brando, and of course, Farooja Ball. I have never seen this one. I saw it in the theater. Holy crap. Yeah. Honestly, I know so little about this movie and so much about its reputation.
that I'm a little intimidated. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Okay. I never watched a documentary about it, but I've like heard some of the like random horror stories. from the filming of this movie, including the director like winding up in a bathtub. Yeah. I'm very, I'm like excited to see it because I just wanted to see like... the thing that has inspired all of this wildness. It's one of these movies that has become notorious because
It was just like when it came out, it was just a big flop. Everyone was like, this is weird. And the choices they made are bizarre. And like, why? Why is this movie? And now that all of the stories have come out about the making of the movie, everyone's like, oh, I get it now. So it's almost like gaining cult status by virtue of the story of its making. I like that, though. Yeah. I'm into that. Yeah. It's fun. Yeah.
ron perlman's in it too oh yeah that's right yeah that's right yeah yeah i'm excited that we get to uh pay homage to val kilmer because i think he is an actor who A lot of people hated for a really long time. And then he sort of as he aged and got sick is a person who had sort of a renaissance and was like, hey, I have never been vulnerable with literally anybody. And now I need to be.
And here's my life. And he actually did that documentary about himself called Val, which I refuse to watch because I know it's gonna make me cry. Yeah, that's fair. So yeah, I'm excited to watch this one. Yeah, it'll be fun. Thanks for listening to attack of the final girls. Find us online at attack of the final girls.com and hear bonus episodes at patreon.com slash attack of the final girls. We're attack of the final girls on Instagram and
Our theme music is by House Ghost and is available on Rad Girlfriend Records. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcasting app so you don't miss an episode and rate and review on Apple Podcasts so more people can find the show. I'm Juliette.