Bob Strauss

The film simply wouldn’t be much, however, without Cooke’s quick-witted performance. She’s formidable and disarming at the same time, all the time. The character’s always got a line and, usually, a good move for any situation.

Setting political movies in the past is an easy, usually safe way to signal virtue. But with its eerie resonances of 2021 reports from Moscow to Washington, D.C., this monochrome aesthetic object looks like something that draws real blood.

This day-after-tomorrow fantasy, made before anybody had even heard of COVID-19, is touchingly romantic and emotionally credible. It’s an escape that resembles our current locked-down lives, with feelings as relatable as they are fictionally heightened.

The first feature by Rose Glass, Saint Maud delivers shocks with confidence.

It’s a more modest Traffic in several ways, adequate at what it tries to say about this dirty business but light on the wider scope of the suffering that it causes. Because there actually is a crisis, maybe it should be addressed with more of an emphasis on authentic details than on genre conventions.