The logline for Mitzi Peirone’s Saint Clare describes it as a story about a devoutly religious but also very murderous Catholic schoolgirl with dissociative identity disorder, and you could say that the film itself suffers from a similar malady. Namely, it seems unsure whether it wants to be a campy slice of macabre in the vein of Dexter and American Horror Story, where the religious imagery and bloodletting are played for both chills and thrills, or a genuine rumination on death, faith, and the morality of doing bad things to bad people.
Saint Clare’s split personality is apparent from the start, with an opening sequence that cuts between Clare (Bella Thorne) in her bedroom, solemnly reciting Joan of Arc quotes about divine purpose, and her being picked up by Joe (Bart Johnson), surely the world’s most obvious pedophile, while waiting for the school bus. When she returns to her bedroom after offing Joe, stopping briefly to give her blood-soaked Chucks a wash, she’s visited by Bob (Frank Whaley), who’s either the ghost of one of her past victims or a trauma-induced hallucination of the same.
Saint Clare, as written by Peirone and Guinevere Turner, doesn’t seem especially interested in explaining the what, why, and how of Bob, and it regularly seems to forget about this quasi-supernatural element altogether for huge periods of time. Which is a shame, because Whaley’s daffy performance as the friendly maybe-ghost is the most entertaining thing in the film.
As for Thorne, she’s never convincing as either the regular high schooler or the sociopath lurking underneath. In fairness, it’s pretty unreasonable to ask a 27-year-old woman to pass as a teen, but Thorne’s decision to bridge that gap by speaking all her lines in a sulky monotone leads to a performance that’s simply wooden. The schism between the age of her character and what we’re seeing on the screen often fundamentally undermines the film. Even that opening sequence reads a little off because Joe is clearly a child predator, stalking out a school bus stop and pretending to be a parent to gain his victim’s trust, while she’s clearly not a child.
When other girls from her school go missing, Clare goes sleuthing and discovers that Joe was just one member of a human-trafficking operation that also includes his brother (also played by Johnson). As she hunts down the other perps, the plot unfolds in a way that’s both needlessly complicated and boringly obvious, right down to a climactic, scarcely surprising villain reveal.
Visually, Peirone’s film is certainly doing a lot—every other scene has the camera bobbing around or framing the action from an obscure spot behind an object halfway across the room—but none of it seems particularly well-motivated or meaningful. Even the most basic shot/reverse shot compositions have a strange clumsiness to them.
Saint Clare is the sort of film that can leave the viewer, like Clare, worrying whether they’ve got things gravely wrong. That is, whether all its wonkiness—the madcap genre-hopping, the strange casting, the visual messiness—isn’t some intentional attempt to create an M. Night Shymalan-esque sense of off-ness or a way of calling attention to its own construction to reveal some deeper truth. It’s possible that that’s true, just as it’s possible that Clare herself really is a vengeful vessel of the Lord, on a holy mission to smite wrongdoers. But those deeper revelations never really arrive, so, unless you’re also willing to operate on blind faith, you’re left with the much likelier explanation that she’s just nuts and the film just isn’t very good.
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