“Everything I have said and done has been in the hands of God. I was born to do this. I am not afraid.” So says Clare Bleecker (Bella Thorne) to herself while lying in bed in an inverted Jesus Christ pose at the beginning of Saint Clare – and she will recite the same words at regular intervals throughout the film, like a personal mantra. This is in fact a quote from Joan of Arc, whom Clare considers a rôle model because she too was a young Catholic woman who “killed an awful lot of men” – although as different people point out to Clare, from the would-be abductor/rapist Joe Morton (Bart Johnson) to her own beloved grandmother and guardian Gigi (Rebecca De Mornay), Joan of Arc ended up burnt at the stake.
Like Joan, Clare cuts an ambiguous figure. For her fearless and fatal pursuit of male aggressors, in which she was initiated and blooded many years earlier by a violent childhood incident at summer camp, all at once marks her as a saintly protectress of women against ungodly men, and as, more straightforwardly, a sociopathic serial killer. “You’re smart, you’re pretty, but you’re dishonest,” says Juliana LeBlanc (Joy Rovaris), capturing her friend’s contradictory, duplicitous nature. Clare can look after herself, but also gets lost in dissociative dazes and has otherworldly visions (lit by DP Luka Bazeli in giallo-esque colours) — and while Gigi worries hearing her granddaughter constantly talk to herself at night, it is hardly less alarming to learn that Clare is ‘really’ conversing with the ghost of middle-aged Mailman Bob (Frank Whaley), six months dead since encountering Clare in the woods, and “here”, as he himself says, “representing the last itsy bitsy piece of your conscience.”
Clare is like one of those pre-Code heroines whom former actress Gigi so admires for being “whole people, emancipated from the harness of how a woman was supposed to behave.” For she is a moral mess of impulse and assurance, yet adamantly adheres to her own principles and faith while sticking it hard to the man, and inverts the norms of sex in much the same way that drama teacher Cole Edwards (Joel Michaely) has his cast – including Clare – switch gender rôles for a production of Ira Levin’s 1978 play Deathtrap. Clare too is caught in a double bind. For even as she tries to fit into her new town, be “normal Clare Bleecker” and to have some fun engaging in “the acceptable kind of trouble” for teens, she is also having to evade the police detective Rich Timmons (Ryan Phillippe) who is investigating her latest murderous act, while she herself tries to work out who is behind the local disappearances of women going back decades, and still very much ongoing.
“How do so many women go unnoticed?” Clare will ask, in a key line of feminist inquiry from Saint Clare. Certainly nobody could accuse Clare – or, for that matter, the film’s writer/director Mitzi Peirone – of being inconspicuous or undistinguished. Peirone and her co-writer Guinevere Turner have adapted Don Roff’s 2021 novel Clare at 16, while also drawing from Billy O’Brien’s I Am Not A Serial Killer (2016) and Jennifer Reeder’s Knives and Skin (2019) and Perpetrator (2023), all to create a complicated, challenging and compelling character who earns at least part of our sympathy for her adventures in righteous slaughter even as her male victims – Bob aside – earn exactly none, while her adolescent peers Truman (Jan Luis Castellanos) and Wade (Dylan Flashner) are yet to become fully-formed men.
This is all at once murder mystery, small-town psychodrama, coming-of-age narrative and rape revenger, as a damaged woman experiences the very real male threats all around her (no matter where in America she goes) as religious ordeal and trial by fire, from which she may emerge sullied yet sanctified.
Saint Clare had its UK première at FrightFest 2024, 25 August
