A pious nurse becomes dangerously obsessed with saving the soul of her dying patient.

There but for the grace of God goes Maud, a reclusive young nurse whose impressionable demeanor causes her to pursue a pious path of Christian devotion after an obscure trauma. Now charged with the hospice care of Amanda, a retired dancer ravaged by cancer, Maud's fervent faith quickly inspires an obsessive conviction that she must save her ward's soul from eternal damnation - whatever the cost. Making her feature-film debut, writer/director Rose Glass cannily lures the audience into this disturbed psyche, steadily setting up her veritable diary of a country nurse for an unnerving and ultimately shocking trajectory. Morfydd Clark (also at the Festival in The Personal History of David Copperfield) portrays the sanctimonious Maud with an intense stoicism that belies a disquieting vulnerability, as Maud desperately vies for absolution and solidarity from her embittered patient (an enthralling Jennifer Ehle, also at the Festival in Beneath the Blue Suburban Skies). Glass tenderly captures this relationship with an empathetic gaze that first assumes an ethereal, dreamlike atmosphere--but before long, Maud's dogmatic candor incites an irreconcilable friction that spirals her mind into a suffocating confluence of creeping doubt and paranoia. As Glass tightens the screws on her misguided martyr, well-placed nods are made to religious horror forerunners like William Friedkin's "The Exorcist," further contributing to the film's increasingly dread-filled malaise. And when this insidious fever climatically breaks, the consequences are devastating and terrifying in equal measure.—Toronto International Film Festival

Deeply-religious Maud, a tight-lipped live-in nurse with a dark past, takes a job in a humdrum English coastal town to look after Amanda Köhl, a once-celebrated, now terminally-ill former dancer and choreographer. Convinced that she has been sent to sensualist, chain-smoking Amanda with a purpose, ascetic Maud soon becomes obsessed with saving her vulnerable patient from herself, and in the process, lead her to the light. However, is worldly Amanda prepared to receive absolution for her sins?—Nick Riganas

In Coney Island, England, the nurse Katie quits her job and has a breakdown after losing a patient in the hospital where she works. She changes her name to Maud, converts to the Catholic church and works in a private agency providing nursing care to the needy. She is assigned caretaker of the former dance and choreographer Amanda Köhl, who is terminal with lymphoma. The pious Maud believes she can save the soul of the atheist Amanda and likes to pray with her. One night, Maud meets Carol and discovers that she has sex with Amanda. Soon she asks the young woman to forget Amanda since it was not good to her situation. On the day of Amanda's birthday, she discloses to her guests that Maud wants to save her soul and mocks her. Maud punches her face and is fired. Now Maud her mental illness and loneliness affect her, and she believes she was rejected by God. She tries to return to the previous mundane life she had, but her loneliness worsens her mental balance until she talks to God that tells her that she knows what to do.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil