St. Agatha is set in the 1957 and focuses on Mary, an unwed pregnant woman who goes to a convent to get care because she wants to keep her baby, but she discovers that she may have made a mistake. What is really going on?
St. Agatha is a clumsy movie and not worth your time. I do not mind mashing up different genres, but I do mind being misled. It has all the trappings of a supernatural horror movie complete with an Omen like soundtrack and ominous red lighting, but there is nothing supernatural about this story at all. The writer simply thought, “What if the Magdalene asylum was a horror movie,” but did not have the courage to keep it associated with the Catholic Church as in reality instead favoring an isolated, sinister, sadistic group of wicked women. The idea has merit though slightly distasteful and exploitive considering its origins in real life tragedy that only stopped in 1996. If it had really embraced it in a Get Out way by leaning into women’s surreal reality of losing agency when pregnant and being classified as insane instead of diluting it with supernatural teasers and resorting to torture porn, which is the most evocative tool in the film, completely removed from reality, it could have been a strong movie, but instead it is a bit of a bore at one hour forty-three minutes.
I actually do not like torture porn, and after watching St. Agatha, I discovered that the director was involved with the Saw franchise, which I have never seen and am not interested in. It made sense. The torture porn was the best part of the movie—the mind games, the ways that the people with power had the girls torture themselves in order to survive, but it was not that other parts seemed excessively gruesome, it just seemed extra and ill-fitting for the sake of satisfying sadism such as the baby bird part. On one hand, it is really cool to show someone get hit in the head with a shovel just as you think that they are safely exiting an area, but it requires the person brandishing the shovel to expect that you will be going to that door at that exact point. Some moments feel gross for gross sake, not necessarily organic. If there were more scenes like the umbilical cord, which was brilliant, then I would have enthusiastically embraced the film’s oeuvre, but there were times when I had an idea of the direction that the movie could go to go extreme, but it punked out. For instance, Sarah’s punishment would have made a terrific psychological torture meal. Other moments involving drugs conceptually fit the movie perfectly, but were undercut by not being effectively depicted and dabbling in Rosemary’s Baby allusions which made the plot seem directed to a Satanic direction.
St. Agatha has a narrative problem. It opens with a how we got here trope then there are flashbacks peppered throughout the story. The opening scene reappears in the middle of the movie. So a lot of the movie ends up feeling repetitive so a chronological approach would have been more effective and felt less like filler. Also the film is initially strong at evoking what happens, but then loses confidence in the audience and explicitly shows what happened. A good filmmaker would have been confident. There is one scene when a boy goes into a bathroom. We know that boy is not around later. Instead it shows the aftermath, people’s reactions when our imagination was stronger than what was shown, including the acting. It then falls into tropes. The film repeatedly shows us something horrible then have characters explain what we just saw. I know. I was there. It is excruciating.
St. Agatha follows the protagonist, but the movie got stronger when it stopped following her and briefly diverted focus to other women or the Mother Superior, who is the best part of the movie. Carolyn Hennesy deserves to be in the American remake of Dark Habits if anyone attempts to commit sacrilege. Imagine an American, severe, colder Sharon Osbourne. Even though the movie gives us a lot of background on Mary, it does not convey why the Mother Superior would relate to and show a special interest in her or why she is the obvious final girl who stands a chance of upending the whole system. Unfortunately the movie does a great job of suggesting that she is dumb as dirt for not seeing all the glaring warning signs at the beginning of the movie. The place is obviously a chamber of horrors from the inception, especially Chekhov’s bear trap. There was a huge missed opportunity to explore how some women become victims and others become enforcers, which would have improved the momentum of the film. When the film sets up the denouement, while it is a clever turning of the tables, it requires a lot of suspension of disbelief and comes heavily from left field in spite of Mary’s professional history, which is poorly laid out and needed more development if we were supposed to believe that Mary and the Mother Superior were kindred spirits. Instead the film spends a disproportionate amount of time mooning over lost love which would have been better spent dealing with logistics, power dynamics and personalities. The romantic storyline only gives one or two good chilling moments to nail how horrible the institution is. While it makes us think the story will go one way, the other way is more intriguing. We should be able to see seeds of Mother Superior in Mary, and I absolutely did not. Mary is so clearly a goody two shoes flirting with gray then running back to the safe space.
St. Agatha was torn between its goal. Did it want to be a movie about people getting swallowed up and victimized or does it want to turn tables and become a revenge movie? Those movies have very different beats though they can have a Venn diagram of narrative points. The prior does not need a great protagonist, but the latter does. There is also an afterthought Billy Bathgate vibe that a criminal enterprise is approaching the end and is vulnerable, but you can imagine it in its glory days. A movie about the logistics of the institution would have been more fascinating than telling me the same down on her luck story that practically writes itself. If this movie had approached it as an evil internship gone sideways with a less milquetoast protagonist who could potentially go either way on the moral fork in the road yet could still end up good because of lack of experience of witnessing consequences of her moral deviations, this horror film could have been brilliant. It is the chasm between laziness and inventiveness.
Do not see St. Agatha. It is disappointing, misleading and a poorly paced mess. I am so glad that I did not see it in theaters. Someone hire Hennesy, who is the best part of the movie. The other actors may have been great, but were not given much of an opportunity to showcase their talent with such an inconsistent story and having to act through layers of makeup.
