Saint Maud review – desire, despair and ‘godgasms’ as Rose Glass’s shocker comes to life

With its extreme closeups and eerily distorted faces, Rose Glass's 2019 horror film Saint Maud has no shortage of scenes to make you flinch. But in Glass's screenplay, words also jab like the desperately devout nurse Maud's injections, starting with the blunt expletive used to describe terminally ill Amanda by her departing employee. After Maud takes over, a series of caustic voiceovers reveal her own surprisingly sharp tongue.

This compelling adaptation by novelist Jessica Andrews (Saltwater) and Jack McNamara, who also directs, keeps the wounding exchanges between characters but adds a sensory warmth that deepens their relationships. Andrews and McNamara don't just capitalise on what a tale of body horror can obviously gain in live performance – including the moments of religious ecstasy that Glass dubbed " godgasms ", here movement-directed by Roberta Jean. They also repeatedly linger on their characters' descriptions of taste, touch and smell, all reinforcing the physicality. "You've got soft hands," Amanda (Dani Arlington) tells Maud (Brogan Gilbert) in their first meeting. She later smells Maud's scalp as if she is a newborn baby and even licks her hair.

In the film, former dancer Amanda has copies on her shelf of a book she wrote entitled The Body Is a Stage. The play emphasises the pain she now experiences in her body, as well as the sexual pleasure and professional pride it has brought her. Andrews and McNamara add scenes of her teaching Maud a basic choreography where she looks longingly at the younger woman's figure while haunted by archive footage on a TV screen of her old performances.

Alison Ashton's domestic set, on a sloping stage, has a full-length mirror that acknowledges a past spent in dance studios. When Maud wears Amanda's silk dressing gown, she tries on the older woman's identity, too, watching her reflection. The pair's mutual desire and disapproval, and their shared vulnerability, are well handled although Amanda's mystique and Maud's mortification are weakened in the adaptation.

With an equivalent running time to the film (80-odd minutes, kept similarly tense including the ending's impact), this is a chamber drama with an excellent cast of three. Carol (Neshla Caplan), the sex worker who visits Amanda, takes over the additional plot function of Joy, Maud's former acquaintance, filling in the nurse's traumatic backstory.

The setting is relocated from Scarborough to a fictionalised version of Redcar, with the jutting edges of the stage covered in grit and pebbles. The rumbles and echoes in Gazelle Twin's compositions evoke industrial and elemental forces. If its religious strains are less powerfully entwined, the score's sophistication helps to elevate the old-fashioned stage trickery, including some restless furniture.

"I can feel it when you're watching," says Maud at the start, addressing the room as well as God whom she confides in throughout, although without the stern reproach of Morfydd Clark in the film. McNamara's production increases that sense of intimacy by bringing Gilbert into the auditorium, directly approaching audience members, during her drunken night on the town. Having played a blushing and dutiful naif she suddenly ages and hardens before our eyes, aided by Drummond Orr's lighting. In a story about transformation, it is from this point that a strong performance turns into a stupendous one. The film rightly made Clark a major star; Gilbert deserves the same.