dir. Mitzi Peirone

Filmmaker Mitzi Peirone’s sophomore film Saint Clare (stylized as SAINT CLARE) follows sociopathic Catholic schoolgirl Clare Bleecker as she seeks to violently uncover the perpetrators behind a string of abductions targeting teenage girls in her anonymous small town. Bella Thorne stars as the eponymous Clare alongside Ryan Phillippe portraying Detective Timmons, a policeman tasked with tailing Clare, whom he correctly believes is responsible for the murder of a local deadbeat Joe (Bart Johnson). Rebecca De Mornay plays Clare’s eccentric grandmother and caretaker who steps up in the wake of the death of the girl’s parents, and Erica Dasher plays Amity, Clare’s frenemy and co-star in the college play. 

The film opens with a rejoinder spoken continuously by Clare throughout the film, “Everything I have said and done has been in the hands of God,” attributed to Joan of Arc. Clare quietly but persistently intones this prayer during the film’s opening sequence, in which we learn, via flashback, that as a child she once killed a man assaulting a woman in the wilderness by bludgeoning him from behind with a rock. She also repeats this phrase to Joe, who offers her a ride home from her campus in his filthy car—presumably with intentions to rape her and mark her as the next girl to be disappeared—before she strangles him with his seatbelt and sends the vehicle hurdling off the road and into a building. 

This murder sets off a chain reaction of events that causes Clare’s grandmother to grow concerned with her increasingly dissociative mental state, Detective Timmons to begin to close in on her as a suspect in the murder, and eventually, Clare herself to discover a nefarious sex trafficking ring operating on the outskirts of town. This unremarkably harrowing organization is helmed by Randall (Joe’s identical twin also portrayed by Johnson, only this time in a bad wig), protected by a corrupt Detective Timmons, and given insider access to teenage girls via Amity, who has double-crossed her friends. As Clare gets closer to the banal center of these crimes, her conscience—personified in the form of Bob (Frank Whaley), a drunk mailman whose death she previously witnessed, plagues her with guilt—attempts to reel in her unwieldy behavior. In the film’s rushed ending, Clare, faced with Amity’s betrayal, substitutes a prop knife for a real one just before they take the stage for the play’s opening night, in which the duo will soon spar.

Saint Clare is a mostly forgettable entry in the soon-to-be-oversaturated genre of feminist revenge thriller films that reached its climax with Promising Young Woman (2020, directed by Emerald Fennell). This genre traces its roots to the sexploitation rape-revenge films of the 1970s, infusing it with an identity-driven sensibility and feminine flair that appeals to a new generation of true crime-pilled female media consumers. Saint Clare‘s problem is not so much one of themes as it is one of execution. Thorne’s laconic performance does not do much to invigorate a film lacking a strong thematic throughline, clear exposition, or genuine thrill. The cinematic goldmine of Catholicism, at the very least, furnishes Peirone with a reliable set of decadent visuals and a moral compass a la Immaculate (2024, directed by Michal Mohan) to guide the film through a poorly written plot in the hands of a cruel God suited to feminist horror. But Peirone does not take this opportunity far enough, opting to only invoke religion as necessary, with the occasional voiceover quoting Joan of Arc during flashback sequences, perfunctory shots of the college-age cast singing ominous hymnals in the school choir, and a pretty sequence in which Clare pays her respects to her dead mother in a baroque mausoleum.

Peirone’s strength lies in her strong eye for austere visuals that break up the forward motion of the film with much-needed shots of voluptuous gore: blood slowly seeping into the shower drain, a brief, staccato sequence as the film winds down where Clare remembers her dearly departed grandmother (who has been killed by Detective Timmons, of course) through fragmented flashbacks interspersed with key encounters with violence at a young age. If only the director had committed wholeheartedly to this sensual approach without relying on the trappings of a mediocre horror formula that sees our final girl avenged and our villains vanquished, Saint Clare might have broken new ground. What could have been an exciting exploration of the psycho-religious interiority of a female anti-hero instead succumbed to the homogenizing dictates of the box office.

“So trenchant is the critique of masculine attitudes and behaviors [in male-directed rape revenge films] . . .that were they made by women, they would be derided as male-bashing. (Were they mainly consumed by women, they would by the same token be derided as a sop to feminism).” Clover’s prescient words penned in Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992) ring true in light of a new era of female-driven, female-directed, and female-consumed revenge thrillers that nonetheless fail to satisfy our innermost desires for retribution against the patriarchy. Perhaps glossy depictions of violence against women will never enact revolution, as hard as we might try to dismantle the oppressor’s house with his blood-splattered toolkit. Saint Clare could be considered a step in the right direction, where the sanitized girlboss feminism of Promising is traded in for a hetero-pessimism more in vogue in this contrarian era of tradwives and coquette Catholics. But until the stymying forces of trope, sexploitation, and millennials ham-handedly writing zoomers are abandoned once and for all, Peirone’s middling attempt at cinematic transcendence will not be canonized by herstory.