Saint Maud: possessed by God?

This movie. Holy shit, and believe me it's so appropriate to say ''holy'', in this case. Saint Maud, directed by female director Rose Glass might be one of the best movies in its genre, and definitely the best in years. In the past decade we have been haunted by possession movies that followed the same boring, overused scheme: a pretty girl possessed by a demon, a lot of jumpscares, a lot of bones cracking, a lot of levitation, most of the times a priest with its faith in doubt who finds God again while exorcising the poor soul. Well, finally Rose Glass put an end at the cliches and turned the whole theme of possession upside down, or in this case, downside up, exploring a kind of possession we have never seen before and an obsession to which we are not strangers at all. Let's see what I mean all this by exploring the plot of Saint Maud. Maud, an alias for Katie, is a nurse who has been part of the weird death of a patient and now works as a caregiver for Amanda, a former ballerina who despite her weak conditions doesn't disdain the vices of drinking, smoking and occasional sexual encounters. Maud, on the other hand found her faith after that terrible experience in the hospital and now dedicates her whole life to God, to whom she claims to talk with and most especially to feel: Maud explains that after each good deed's done by her, she is able to feel God being pleased by her action through physical manifestation that recall an ecstasy or an orgasm...or a demonic possession, through bones cracking and levitation. Throughout the whole movie we see Maud on her mission to save Amanda's soul from perdition and sin and when she thinks she is accomplishing her mission, pleasing God we see God (or something else) possessing her body. In a faith crisis, after losing her job at Amanda's, Maud will sin multiple times and inflict herself punishments, cruel physical punishments such as walking with nails inside her shoes to which has been attached a picture of Mary. The climax of the movie is reached in the most horror scene in which God (or the Enemy) will speak to Maud with a deep low voice, telling her he is proud of her and reminding her her final mission that will grant her to sit next to him. As a messenger of God Maud will try one last time to save a dying Amanda's soul but the woman shifts into a demonic figure, at least to Maud's eyes, and will reveal her that God doesn't exist. Maud will kill Amanda, not believing her words and finally her mission is completed: the demonic temptation has been defeated and she earned her beautiful angelic wings. The movie will end with one of the most beautiful sequences I have ever seen: Maud walks on a beach and soaks herself with gasoline and sets herself on fire, under the horrified eyes of the passers-by. The final scene shows us Maud surrounded by warm white heavenly flames, the passers-by praying around her, in ecstasy to that divine vision, AND THEN, a frame of a screaming Maud, her face destroyed by the fire. Damn. Peak cinema. So, now that we have seen what Saint Maud is about, let's analyze what I consider its most important aspects: -The name Maud: we discover from a Maud's former colleague that her real name is Katie, so we can assume she changed her name after her christian conversion. But why Maud? Maud is a germanic name that means ''powerful battler'', so I imagine that Maud sees herself as a warrior for God, a sort of Joan of Arc on a mission. -The cockroach: in the very first sequence of the movie, Maud sits next to a wall after having presumibely killed her patient and a cockroach crawls on the wall, the same cockroach we see after she has sinned and her body is twisted during the last and strongest possession, before going on her last mission. I suppose we can think of the cockroach as the embodiment of God, or Satan, that intervenes in important events of her life when her faith is weakest. -The spirals: when Maud is in a bar she sees little spirals forming inside drinks and when she looks at the sky, the clouds always open and the divine light descends in a spiral. But what if that's not the descent of the divine on her, but rather her own descent to hell? After all, we don't get any clarification about whether it's God or the devil possessing her. -Possession or ecstasy: the second, I dare say. When the movie started I was 100% sure Maud was being possessed by the devil but then I came to realize that the line between obsession and possession is very thin and in christian history we have had multiple cases of visions, ecstasy (for example The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, sculpted by Lorenzo Bernini, representing the moment of ecstasy through the physical pleasure of the saint in contact with the divine). So once again what we see could both be an ecstasy or a possession, as the events appear very similar and the personality of Maud lead us to believe she could both be acting with truly good intentions inspired by God, fighting the devil testing her faith, but also it could be plainly the Devil playing with her mind, having appeared to her in a weak moment of her life and led her to perdition as a false God. -Heaven or Hell: and finally the most important question; what happened when Maud caught fire? Was it heavenly fire or hellfire? At the first glance, if you follow the theory that Maud has been possessed by the devil the whole time you might think that she ended up in hell, but let me give you another point of view. What if Maud truly was on a mission for God and her intentions were truly saint, but when she at last ascended to Heaven she discovered that Heaven is not what she thought? What if Heaven is Hell? Personally this is my favourite view of Saint Maud.