Women’s mental health is the main focus of both Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water (2002) and Rose Glass’ Saint Maud (2019), two of the most unsettling horror films of the 21st century. In both films, the spectator is left wondering if any of the disturbing supernatural occurrences experienced by the two protagonists are in fact real, or figments of their imagination. Are they indeed sane or completely mad? This has been the subject of many initial responses and academic writings on both films. In her review for Sight and Sound, Ela Bittencourt wrote, “Saint Maud skillfully blurs the line between a possible medical condition and outright madness” (Bittencourt, 2020, p.80). While Sarah Arnold pointed out that in Dark Water, the mother’s “history of ‘madness’ and her all too obvious reliance on medication” affects the way the spectator identifies and interprets her behaviour (Arnold, 2013, p. 127).
However, the more engaging question is not whether they are indeed mad, but how this manifested madness is depicted on screen, how the spectator shares the physical and emotional journey they embark on, and what this shared experience says about society as a whole. “Women were believed to be more vulnerable to insanity than men, to experience it in specifically feminine ways, and to be differently affected by it in the conduct of their lives.” (Schneider, 2001, p. 14). This essay aims to examine the delicate ways in which both films capture the female experience, as well as their vulnerability to ‘madness’ in today’s world. However, in order to do so, one needs to first take a phenomenological approach to analyzing Dark Water and Saint Maud.
Vivian Sobchack wrote that “contemporary film theory has not taken bodily being at the movies very seriously–and, at best, it has generally not known how to respond to and describe how it is that movies ‘move’ and ‘touch’ us bodily, how they provoke in us ‘carnal thoughts’ before they provoke us to conscious analysis” (Sobchack, 2015). By breaking down the sensory experience of Yoshimi Matsubara (Hitomi Juroki) in Dark Water and Maud (Morfydd Clark) in Saint Maud, one can not only access their psychological and bodily state of being, but understand the ramifications of the outside world on their internal selves. After all, the spectator does not see the world objectively through the eyes of the filmmakers, we see it through the eyes of the protagonists. During the most pivotal moments in Dark Water and Saint Maud, the filmmakers merely project the detected light and reverberated sounds received by the warped perception of our lonely protagonists. By allowing the visual and sensuous imagery to envelop us, we are forced to slip into the soaking wet pumps and the piercing nail-filled shoes of our protagonists.
Through the phenomenology of film, “‘the cases to be managed’ and ‘problems to be solved’, take the lead in defining support and generating knowledge about madness” (Russo, 2016, p. 60). This essay will start with analyses of the hinted upon troubled pasts of Maud and Matsubara, and how their traumas resurface in various forms throughout the films. I will then inspect the textures of the physical worlds surrounding them, and how water and fire are used to activate and instigate emotional responses. Finally, the essay will explain how this all relates to the ethics of care, particularly child care and end-of-life care. In Towards a Feminist Theory of Caring, Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher wrote about the importance of care in our lives and how it consists of “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (Tronto, 1990). This essay will look at how both films showcase the handling, or mishandling, of care between various characters, as well as how scorching loneliness and the dreadful feeling of abandonment are directly related to gendered madness. Ultimately, both Dark Water and Saint Maud are stark reminders of how the exclusion, neglect, and gendered oppression of women within society and the medical community have dire consequences on the way we perceive, treat, and care for mental health.
A great opening scene usually sets the stage and introduces the main characters of a film, but when done right, it gives viewers a good indication of what the film’s themes will be about. In that respect, Saint Maud and Dark Water waste no time in plunging us straight into the traumatic experiences of the protagonists’ troubled pasts. In a tight close-up shot, the camera glides down on a strand of hair before finally landing on a pool of blood. The film then cuts to another close-up, the main protagonist, Maud. Her face is covered in blood, her dark pupils looking out into the distance, fixed in a frozen stare of complete utter shock. We cut to her point of view, a slightly upwards angled wide shot of a dead patient dangling from a hospital bed. With each cut within the first three shots, the viewer creeps closer to our protagonist, till the spectator quite literally slips into her mind with a POV shot. Maud is now sitting in the corner, she looks up and, we see a cockroach on the ceiling.
The scene fades to black and we see the bold capital letters of the title filling the screen, “SAINT MAUD”. The white title transitions into a red boiling pot of tomato soup. We see and hear the thick red bubbly liquid forming and inevitably bursting into splashes. The direct experience of this affective imagery perfectly encapsulates the uneasiness of watching Maud throughout the film. The spectator knows that her trauma is constantly boiling beneath the surface, waiting to explode at any given moment. When Saint Maud switches from past to present, or vice versa, the colour imagery changes as well. In one shocking moment later on in the film, a dark green palette instantly thrusts viewers back to that traumatic incident. During a sex scene, Maud’s hands are placed on a man’s chest. Suddenly, the colour palette changes from warm yellow to dark green. Maud is now performing chest compression on a patient. Back in the present we hear the guy breathing heavily during sex, the sound of him breathing takes us back to a fleeting moment of her patient gasping for air. The film uses colour and sound as emotional triggers to her trauma. She’s now performing CPR in the present time and his chest collapses. Maud screams, and we cut back to the three opening shots of the film. The man takes advantage of her disoriented and confused state of mind, and proceeds to rape her despite her pleas for him to stop. This anxiety inducing switch from past to present, yellow to green, is extremely unsettling and distressing. According to Dr. Debra Kaminer, two indicators of PTSD is when the traumatic event is persistently re-experienced through “recurring and intrusive distressing recollections of the event, including images, thoughts or perceptions” as well as suddenly “reliving the experience, illusions, hallucinations, and dissociative flashback episodes” (Kaminer, 2010, p.30). In Saint Maud, post-traumatic stress disorder is not told, it is felt.
Similarly, colour and sound are strategically used in the opening sequence of Dark Water to represent flashbacks from the past. “Colour provides an external expression of Yoshimi’s inner turmoil” (Balmain, 2014, p.139) Only here, brownish-yellow represents the past. The first image we see in the film is that of a young Yoshimi, waiting to be picked up by her parents at school. The sound of pouring rain floods the soundscape. The camera pulls back and we see an isolated Yoshimi looking at all the other kids getting picked up by their parents. A teacher walks in and asks, “Yoshimi, no one’s come for you?” The camera moves closer to the young girl, as the sound of rain grows louder. The film cuts to the present, revealing a much older Yoshimi looking outside another window as it rains outside, the sound of rain “creating continuity between distinct temporal spaces” (Balmain, 2014, p.139). In other words, the heavy rain becomes “a motivator for the flashback” (Arnold, 2013, p. 129).
Much has been written about the representation of rain and water in Dark Water. For example, Nina K. Martin writes that the growing water stain in her apartment symbolizes Yoshimi’s mental deterioration, and that “water serves as a conduit for paranormal activity, elevating the natural to the supernatural” (Martin, 2008). However, looking at the way water works in the film cinematically through the lens of mental health reveals so much about the visualization of emotional states. Water transports the spectator to a specific emotion, a specific image of the past. Its constant recurrence could very well be an intrusive present-day recollection of that traumatic event from the past, or perhaps a collective trauma of all women; this trauma representing the cycle of neglect within society. In both Saint Maud and Dark Water, image and sound are used to trigger our memory and “‘move’ and ‘touch’ us bodily” (Sobchack, 2015). Through the specificity of the filmic medium, the spectator experiences sensations from the past. By playing with the visual and aural sensory of perception, the spectator almost instantly flips from one emotional and psychological state to another. This extends even to the phenomenal space surrounding our both Maud and Yoshimi.
Writing about the female body experience, Iris Marion Young wrote that “feminine existence lives space as enclosed or confining, as having a dual structure, and the woman experiences herself as positioned in space”. In her essay, she points to a famous study by Erik Erikson in which male and females were to construct a setting, and typically females would construct indoor scenes, while men created outdoor settings. (Young, 1990, p. 39). Since both Dark Water and Saint Maud are very much concerned with the female experience of madness within society, it makes perfect sense that both films are predominantly set within claustrophobic indoor settings. For Maud and Yoshimi, the walls surrounding them seem to be closing in on them, dialing up their frustration with the situations they have been dealt.
After Maud gets fired from her job, she feels completely abandoned, not just by society, but by God. We hear the sound of drums as she walks down a boardwalk. We see flickering neon lights all around her. She tries to make eye contact with a man sitting across from her in a bar. After a brief sexual encounter in the bathroom, he leaves in a hurry. She looks to her left and notices a group of friends chatting and laughing. The camera cuts to a reaction shot of her smiling awkwardly before releasing a forced disruptive laugh. The group of friends briefly glance at her in confusion and ignore her. These moments are almost as painful to watch as any of the film’s more violence scenes. Maud, completely separated from others, begins to feel the relentless feeling of loneliness enveloping her world.
The following scene is of Maud on a phone uncharacteristically reaching out to Joy in a bathroom stall. The expressionistic shot is framed to empathize the narrowness of the bathroom, the overwhelming walls on both her sides make her seem completely separated from the reality of the outside world. Joy turns her down, and we see Maud running her finger against the wall. There is a wall between her and everyone else, both literally and figuratively. The phenomenology of that cammed up space allows the spectator to experience what it feels like to be completely rejected and alone. As soon as she walks back into the bar, the sound of drums and distant chatter fades away. An ominous soundtrack kicks in and the viewer is forced to experience the world through her eyes. We see a woman crunching loudly on chips, drunkards taking shots of liquor, a random malevolent laughter is heard in the background, a creepy old man gives her the looks. As Virginia Woolf once said while describing the cinematic experience, “the eye licks it all up instantaneously, and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think” (Woolf, 1926). Like a psychophysiological response to repulsive sights and sudden sounds, the spectator shares her irritated responses to her surroundings. Maud looks at her pint of beer, and sees a cyclone suddenly forming out of nowhere. Her isolation is spiraling her mind out control.
In Dark Water, the emotional turmoil of being a single parent in a patriarchal society is what affects Yoshimi’s supposedly unstable state of mind. As the threat of losing her child grows more imminent, and the more her ex-husband gaslights her by exploiting her history of mental health, the walls around her begin to deteriorate uncontrollably. The flooding water penetrating the walls, and the heavy rain constantly pouring down outside of her home, makes the spectator share this dreadful feeling of being trapped. The space surrounding our protagonist reflects her emotional disposition. Because of the hidden traps of a male-driven world, with all the heavy demands and expectations that come with it, Yoshimi is “thereby both culturally and socially denied the subjectivity, autonomy, and creativity that are definitive of being human” (Young, 1990, p. 31). Yoshimi is expected to pull off the impossible- to maintain her sanity while fighting off a lawsuit against her husband, as well as embarking on search for a good paying job, taking care of her only child, and dealing with an apartment that is falling apart. As if this wasn’t enough to trigger a mental breakdown, but on top of all that, a ghost is literally haunting her from the past as well.
However, the real horror in Dark Water has nothing to do with the ghost, and everything to do with losing one’s own parent or child. External forces, such as the socioeconomics of dealing with a divorce, fighting for custody, and the impossibility of maintaining full-time employment, fuel the spectator and Yoshimi’s shared fear of an inevitable separation. Due to the destructive tides of the patriarchy, mother and child can’t help but drift apart. The demands of single-parent motherhood are designed to work against the mother. Sarah Arnold perfectly describes the historic link between single-parent motherhood and madness in cinema when she wrote that “female characters who act outside of their socio-ideological roles are often figured as abnormal, monstrous or mad” (Arnold, 2013, p.131). And in this case, this ‘madness’ is used by male-figures to feed into “a cycle of parental abandonment” (Balanzategui, 2013, p. 7).
Parental neglect is portrayed as a problem that has been passed down from one generation to another causing separation related traumas. Dark Water “reinforces the hopeless repetition involved across the lives of three females, often collapsing the boundaries between them, as we witness repeated scenes of the three characters being left behind by their parents as young children” (Balanzategui, 2013, p. 7). The most significant moment in Dark Water that exemplifies how this inescapable negligence takes a toll on both the mother and child, comes in a montage that not only cuts between two locations, but two time periods. Ikuko waits for her mother at school, while Yoshimi waits to be interviewed at work. The film cuts back and forth between both mother and child. Yoshimi explains her situation to the interviewer, while Ikuko watches the other kids getting picked up by their parents. As she’s waiting for her employer to continue the interview, she picks up her phone. The film cuts to the past, a young Yoshimi is at school waiting alone as well. The teacher leans in and tells her, “Today, daddy is going to get you. So just a little bit longer, ok?” The flashback prompts her to hurry out of work, but Ikuko has already been picked up by her dad. As Yoshimi takes her hand, Ikuko holds back for a second, briefly standing her ground like she’s hesitant of going back with her mother.
It’s an incredibly subtle yet powerful moment in the film. Barbara Creed wrote that “one of the key figures of abjection is the mother who becomes an abject at that moment when the child rejects her for the father who represents symbolic order”. (Creed, 2009, p. 72) This brief moment in Dark Water perfectly encapsulates this abjection, only it’s done within the context of a cycle of single-mothers being oppressed within the patriarchy. Yoshimi is reliving her past, only this time, she’s the mother. One can’t help but wonder whether after experiencing this very specific type of rejection, Yoshimi realizes, understands, and perhaps even forgives her mother for just being human in a society where everything is horribly skewed against you. After all, healing only comes when we accept, process and evaluate the thoughts and feelings from our past.
In Saint Maud, the dynamic of care between characters is quite different. Maud’s actual job is to care for Amanda, a patient who is dying from cancer. However, we soon learn that Maud is quite delusional and unstable, having blind faith in God, and truly believing that her actual purpose in life is to save Amanda from her sinful life. The irony of this dynamic is that Maud is the one providing the care, when she is the one in need of actual care, mental health care. In one pivotal scene, after Amanda expresses that she does not want to be alone, Maud sits next to her before bedtime. Maud tells Amanda that when God came everything changed for her. To which Amanda replies, “so this is a recent conversion?”. Maud nods in agreement, and says, “Sometimes he talks.”
This might be the first time that Maud reveals her delusional state of mind to anyone, but Amanda does not clock her insanity. As with most end-of-life care patients, it’s quite common to wonder what awaits at the other side of death. “Will there be anyone else there? And then what? Nothing?” Amanda wonders if her consciousness will evaporate into eternal oblivion after her physical experience in life terminates. At this vulnerable moment, Maud quickly leans in and assures her that everything will be fine, because God sees her. Amanda smiles at Maud, grabs her hand and crowns her with the title, “my little saviour”, not knowing that this very statement will feed into her desperate delusional need for salvation from her past sins. This notion is re-instilled when Maud receives an illustrated William Blake book with a note that reads: “For Amanda, my saviour”. Many of the visuals from that book get manifested visually, or mentally, throughout the film. Much like Yohsimi’s initial mental health problem was triggered by the disturbing images she was exposed to while working as a translator for graphic novels in Dark Water.
However, one could argue that both Maud and Yoshimi become vulnerable to ‘madness’ because of the pressures of fulfilling certain roles and responsibilities that patriarchal societies expect them to excel at. Yayo Okano writes that “the ethics of care tries to bring our attention to social and political impoverishment, where women’s work is exploited and therefore women are alienated from themselves as well as from social connections” (Okano, 2016, p. 90). Yoshimi and Maud are overworked women trying their best to meet the heavy demands that come with caring for others. When either of them shows the slightest signs of struggle to maintain these responsibilities of care, their whole life falls into jeopardy. Yoshimi is always one mistake away from losing her child, and Maud constantly in threat of losing her job. Without the child or the job, suddenly life becomes meaningless. They both struggle to find purpose, which plunges them into depressive states of loneliness and isolation. While talking to ‘God’, Maud expresses in frustration, “I was ready and open and alive, and this is my reward- unemployable, unoccupied”. And after Ikuko almost drowns in the bathtub, Yoshimi, who is visibly disappointment in herself, cries: “I’ll never leave you alone again.”-a promise that she eventually is forced to break in order to protect her from harm’s way.
In an interview for Sight and Sound, Morfydd Clark talks about the toll that this type of work can take on someone’s mental health, “I’m really interested in the cost of care for people doing it. It’s a huge tragedy that Maud’s suffering has come from trying to care for people” (Williams, 2020, p. 28). Similarly, Yoshimi suffers in order to provide care and protection for her own child. This is only propelled by the historical patriarchal constraints of the male-oriented society in Japan. According to Alana Semuels, “there is no such thing, legally, as joint custody in Japan, and women there tend to be the ones financially responsible for their children”, which is even more difficult to pull off, since most single-parent Japanese women dropped out of work to raise the children. So, when the time comes to take care and provide for their children independently, they find themselves working at entry-level low-paying jobs (Semuels, 2017). The real issue extends beyond the issue of ‘gendered madness’, because if anything, the male-oriented system is what is truly maddening in every sense of the word.
At the end of Dark Water and Saint Maud both our protagonists have a final showdown before surrendering to the supernatural happenings surrounding them. Maud returns to Amanda’s house towards the later stages of her dealing with illness. Amanda is weaker, drained, and nearing her end. After apologizing to Maud for treating her badly the other day, she tells Maud, “You must be the loneliest girl I’ve ever seen”. Maud then proceeds to use her fingers to spread holy water on Amanda’s face, but she won’t have any of it. “Snap out of it honey. He isn’t real. You must know that.” The whole sequence is shot in close-ups; the warm lighting resembling and befitting hell. Amanda delivers the final blow to Maud’s delusion “I hate to be the one to break it to you, but it’s just you and me here. Nothing you do matters.” The film cuts to a close-up of Maud painfully breaking down in silence. It’s at that moment, she realizes her past sins won’t be redeemed. Maud sees Amanda turning into a demonic figure. The spectator is now reliving the emergence of her madness with her. “You came back here, because you’re alone. If you were a true believer that would be enough, but it’s clear now you’re as weak as your faith.” Maud only defense mechanism against the painful truth being delivered is to repress it, or shut it down. In other words, kill the messenger.
In his response to Philiippe Ariès’ The Hour of Our Death, James P. Carse wrote that, “if our focus shifts from the moment of death itself to the responses to death, large conceptual difficulties quickly overtake us” (Carse, 1982, p. 399). Maud’s response to death is ultimately a search for redemption and company. She turns to religion and imagines the presence of an orgasm inducing God, out of fear of accepting the reality that she killed someone, which isolated her from society and in return fueled her sexual frustration. Her recent conversion to religion has absolutely nothing to do with real faith. The second time Maud kills, her delusional mind turns her into some kind of avenging angel out of denial. Maud’s only way to live with her past sins is by giving it false meaning, turning sins into good deeds. At the end, she fulfils a self-imposed purpose. Maud walks to the beach holding a lighter and a bottle filled with gasoline. We see a closeup of Maud’s face being covered in gasoline, the imagery is reminiscent of people getting baptized, only the liquid isn’t purifying, it’s highly flammable. There’s a moment of complete calm before she lights the fire. Everyone falls to their knees, and Maud ascends to the heavens, but the haunting last shot crashes the spectator back to reality. Maud is screaming in agony while burning in ‘hell on earth’.
While Maud willingly ends her life in flames, Yoshimi finds herself drenched in water in an elevator towards the end of Dark Water. Yoshimi’s death is sacrificial. She tells a tearful Ikuko to stay away as the ghost of Mitsuko grabs on to her. Mitsuko’s grip loosens, the second Yoshimi tells her that she’s her mother. The scene cuts to closeups of Yoshimi and Ikuko looking at one another through the glass of the elevator door, before Yoshimi rises to the afterlife (the seventh floor). Ikuko cries for her mother while chasing her through the stairs. When the elevator doors open, a flood of water comes pouring out. It feels almost like a release, like the collective traumas of past abandonments has finally been quenched. The film then picks up ten years later. A grown up Ikuko revisits their old apartment, and finds out that her mother chose to become a mother to someone else in order to protect her own daughter. Yoshimi had been watching over her real daughter all along. In other words, Ikuko learns that “care is equated with self-sacrifice” (Raghuram, 2021, p. 614).
In both Saint Maud and Dark Water, women are faced with sacrificial choices. Yoshimi has to choose between her job or her child. She ends up sacrificing her own life for the protection of her daughter. Initially her act is perceived as parental neglect, but it quickly becomes clear that this very neglect comes from fear of not being able to provide care and protection in the patriarchal world they live in. Maud sacrifices herself to God, believing herself to be an angel sent from heaven to care for others. But the pain they both feel stems from the same source- abandonment and loneliness. When Maud sacrifices her life, the distant sound of bystanders calling on others to stop this madness gets no response whatsoever. In fact, throughout the film, the red flags of her behaviour are completely ignored by everyone around her. In a chapter titled, Madness and the Rights of Women, Elaine Showalter stresses that feminist psychology of women, in particular the mother-daughter relation, and the development of the feminist therapy movement “are essential to the future understanding of women, madness, and culture, and to the development of a psychiatric theory and practice that by empowering women, offers a real possibility of change” (Showalter, 1985, p. 250). Dark City and Saint Maud are stark reminders of how women have been neglected by society and the medical community.
The fundamental principle of care is helping, assisting, and being of service to others in order to improve their situation in life, not just physically or mentally, but universally. Caring “affects every aspect of our lives and is not limited to situations of illness” (Gilligan, 2013, p. 95). When it comes to the realms of nursing, mothering, or receiving mental health care, there is a clear gap of knowledge due to the dominance of one gender over the other in most fields of study. The most accessible way to bring light to these harmful issues affecting society as a whole is through cinema. More than any other artform, film allows us to engage the senses so we can directly experience the phenomenon of the human condition. Pulitzer Prize winning film critic, Roger Ebert, once famously proclaimed that films “are like a machine that generates empathy. If it’s a great movie, it lets you understand a little bit more about what it’s like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, a different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears” (Ebert, 2018) Engaging with the phenomenology of space and time in films like Dark Water and Saint Maud, not only brings to light the implications of neglect on women and their vulnerability to gendered madness in today’s world, but the need to fundamentally reconsider the way we treat and care for others.
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