Kill James Bond! - S4E10.5: Saint Maud

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

You HAVE to check in on your homegirls more often than this ----- This is a preview of a bonus episode! Check it out on our reasonably-priced patreon! ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. As you well know I've been working with a few gazan families to raise money for their daily living costs in the genocide. We're putting all our energy into this one campaign as we have a real chance to get Ahmed and his family out of Gaza. Please, if you can help in any way, be that by donating yourself or sharing the link with friends and family, it will mean the world to me. https://chuffed.org/project/124906-help-ahmed-and-family-evacuate-gaza ----- WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com

INTRO Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I'm November Kelly, joined as always by my friends Abigail, Thorne, and Devon. Hello! How you doing, folks? What's up, Mordheds? I'm not doing it again. Yeah, it's Mordtime, because- Mordtime. Welcome to this Mordio medium.

Yeah, please join us in the Mordatorium. Take your seats. Keep on mordin' in the free world, folks. It was my bonus pick, and we'd just finished our little triplet go on, not religion, let's say, Catholicism, largely. Religion. Right? Yeah, sure. Not religion in the abstract, but Catholicism. And I was like, well, I need to pick a bonus episode.

I made a lot of hay about it being an important bonus episode, but ultimately I chose to completely disregard anything that anyone would come up with, and I went with Saint Maud, which is a movie that I'm excited to talk about for two main reasons. Number one, because I'm really enjoying getting to dig into religion, and this time talk about some British Protestant shit. And also I really like the sort of Mulder and Scully type dynamic that Abbey and November have fallen into over the course of these episodes. ALICE We're gonna figure out whether God is real or not, through the medium of comedy podcasts.

SID We will get to the bottom of it. That's our promise to you. ALICE November's coming to me like, ever heard of the God alien? And I'm like, I don't think that's a real thing. Swab gas, ridiculous, this is an hallucination. Which we will get to, and Dev I'm so glad you picked this, because I really enjoyed isn't the right words, but I had a really good, really interesting time with this one.

List has made me know that this is made, this is Rose Glass's first film. Rose Glass, baby. Rose Love Lies Bleeding Glass Rose Love Lies Bleeding Glass. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereas in this case it's more like Love Neal's praying. And it's a really uncomfortable film, it is a kind of religious psychological horror, and here's the thing that you need to know about me, and I put this out into the world in advance of horror season whenever we do that. I am the scaredest, smallest baby in the world, right?

So because I knew that this was a horror, I watched this on one of the first sunny days of the year, and I watched this in my living room, was flooded with sunlight, specifically it has a skylight in it, really awkwardly placed for the TV, I know, shoot me in the head, I know. But the point is, I was watching this and I've been trying to make adverse conditions movie club a thing for about a year and a half now and no one gets it, that's fine, but in this case it really was, because I could not see. So I apologize in advance, I could have watched it in the dark, but I was too scared, so what I watched instead was like, about a tenth of the light of this movie, and then a lot

of sunlight. M- And just to help the listener, you can go ahead and watch this in the dark, because it doesn't do any jump scares right up until the second last scene, which we will get to, but you can watch it in the dark largely without getting too freaked out. ALICE You kind of need to, because much like Silence, it's a movie that relies on a lot of darkness and sharp contrasts. Really a hallmark when you're dealing with religion, I guess, as well, we need to have a completely black background. RILEY What is religion? But the opiate of the masses,

you know, the poverty-stricken people always reach out to religion. What is the most deprived and evil place in the entire world? It's a British seaside town in the off season. S That's right. RILEY Yes, dismal environment. You need to find God to survive. Yeah. The last place you're gonna find him. What this reminds me of in some ways is Ulrich Seidel's Remini, which is not a textually related movie, but is set in, like, specifically an Italian beachside town in the off-season. Sounds quite nice, you

think? It's not. It's shit. And so this is set in, I don't even want to like name seaside towns, but one of them, a Welsh one, we are led to believe. Yes. Yeah, it's like a shit version of Brighton. It's like Brighton if it was straight, which is like cursed vibes. Like, Clackson or something. Yeah. I can't take a swing at what the Welsh one is, I don't know.

ALICE Yeah. And so we begin in this... LIAM It's gonna be Paris, maybe. ALICE...you know? ALICE This horrible town. RILEY In fact, we do not. We begin with the BFI logo, the logo of the British Film Institute, which is how you know that the director is a white person.

ALICE Just to certify, like, back in the day, right, in the day right like 1920s and stuff union clothing labels used to say like white made to indicate like quality because unions used to be racially like segregated and was like we're getting undercut by like Chinese labor or whatever so this is like made by white people in the USA. BFI adopting the same approach, I guess. They value diverse voices. Not enough to fund their project, but you can apply. Hold on a minute. This director is a woman. Yeah, that's diverse.

Does that count for nothing to you people? That's diverse. That's political. And of course, because this is Britain, right, we're not allowed to do the like, 19 different European Union film fund things anymore, so what we have to do is, this was administered like the funds came from the National Lottery, right, so thank you gambling addicts, your ruin paid for us to see St. Maud. Thank you very much. And I'm sure a grateful nation appreciates that.

Does anyone think that there's something maybe unethical about the way in which we make movies, you know, in this country, in any country? I'm sure that's fine. I think there's something dark and evil at the heart of it, and we'll get to it eventually. Yeah, it's the messiest thing about film criticism, or needing to kind of reify the film as like a good object, but like, um... We open, we open, not in, not in Shithole on Sea, but we open with a nurse who has bloodied hands, she's sitting in a corner, seemingly traumatized by something, she watches a beetle

crawl across the ceiling, and the first thing we hear is the noise that this movie's gonna hit you with about five million times, listeners, because it goes BWAAAA it's got an obtrusive soundtrack. Because the thing is, they changed a memo went out at some point in about 2020 for how horror movies have to sound. And they changed it from the previous obtrusive horror sound, which was, you hold these steel cables taught while I slide these violins down them. They change that to noise your hard drive makes when it's about to die, times a billion, afraid so. I'm afraid so. Transimmer? I dunno. Yeah. How bad? How bad?

Yeah, how bad are we talking here? Scale of 10. 1 to 10. So if I remember right, one of his trans ex-employees kind of blew the whistle on him being like kind of a shit in the workplace. Yeah. Depressing. Canceled.

Canceled. Okay, I'll get to the bottom of this. We then cut forward to her and her shitty apartment is so nice. I just googled hands in my trans and it's only showing me transformers. He's got an ad ahead of it. The perfect cover. He's SEO proofed. Smart, smart. She's packing for work, but she's like packing a suitcase, but she's also praying and this is like intercut and she's praying in her head. I'm eating soup.

Yes, because I'll lead into this as a big bubbling thing of like horrible looking tomato soup. Oh, is it blood? No, it's soup. Yeah, it just feels like evil red liquid bubbling and then it's tomato soup, which really fun, really good. You get your tomato soup, she like pours it out, she like makes the sign of the cross before she eats so you know that there's some... there's some weird shit going on here.

She's fucking serious about it. She's a god botherer. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And she says in her internal monologue, dear god, watch over me as I begin this next posting. Think I'll have to get up at about six tomorrow. It's so conversational. It's perfunctory, right?

To inform God of what time you're getting up. Presumably it knows. I think it's doing two things, right? I think transposing prayer with the rest of anyone else's secular internal monologue is going to make it sound weird, but it's also sort of perfunctory. It's like talking to a subordinate, right? And it reminds me, to some extent, of... we know that maybe the evangelicals think that they can kind of do magic.

I remember watching Jesus Camp, this documentary, about evangelicals. LWX Jesus Camp? I sure hope he is. Good news when we get to the Last Temptation of Christ. It started, but like, it's about like indoctrination of kids by evangelicals. I'll just pile it like I want that twig obliterated. There was this one guy- You're Barabbas obliterated, folks? Barabbas? Gone. Who was doing what I've come to think of as like command prayer, right? Where you do the

thing that you want first and then you slap on some Jesus at the end. So I was trying to fix a broken air conditioner, and the guy's like, I command this air conditioner to work, comma, in Jesus' name. Right? Right. And it reminded me of this, of like, you're kind of like, alright, God, fucking, here's the deal. I gotta do this shit for work, you're gonna, like, look out for me and do the god stuff. WHOOSH. Back!

Back, you slavering dogs. I shan't let you access any more of this podcast unless you head on over to patreon.com slash killjamesbond and cross my palm with at least five pound a month of silver.