Saint Clare – Film Review

Mitzi Peirone’s Saint Clare, based on Don Roff’s novel Clare at Sixteen, is a film that sets its sights on being a subversive, blood-tinged thriller about faith, trauma, and psychopathy. With a leading performance by the underrated Bella Thorne, a story steeped in religious irony and psychological unease, and source material that offers potential for a chilling slow-burn character study, this adaptation seems to have the tools for success. Unfortunately, the film squanders most of them.

The story revolves around Clare Bleecker (Bella Thorne), a seemingly average Catholic school teenager who lives with her grandparents in a sleepy, morally conservative small town. On the surface, she’s a devout vegan, an animal lover, and polite to a fault. But beneath that polished exterior lies a broken psyche—Clare has dissociative identity disorder and a burgeoning thirst for violence. She is a serial killer in the making, or perhaps already fully formed. The duality of innocence and danger is supposed to be the film’s thematic lynchpin, but the execution lacks both subtlety and narrative depth.

Thorne, who has often made bold choices in her recent career, gives a committed performance. She approaches Clare with a balance of deadpan charm and twitchy menace. There are moments where her performance hints at something more complex bubbling under the surface, particularly when Clare’s demeanor shifts on a dime—from serene to sociopathic. However, Thorne is let down by a script that never fully commits to exploring her character’s inner landscape. The psychological underpinnings of Clare’s condition are left vague at best and irresponsibly handled at worst, as the film trades nuance for cheap shock and stylized murder.

The story attempts to blend satire with horror, but the tone is wildly inconsistent. One moment, Saint Clare leans into black comedy—mocking religious institutions and small-town hypocrisy—and the next, it dives headlong into gory horror without any tonal transition. The result is jarring. When the film tries to be clever and edgy, it too often comes across as juvenile, especially in its pseudo-philosophical dialogue and over-stylized violence that lacks emotional weight.

Peirone’s direction is visually ambitious, but the style doesn’t always serve the story. Dreamlike sequences, jarring cuts, and occasional surreal imagery attempt to reflect Clare’s fractured mind, yet they feel like affectations rather than a meaningful exploration of mental illness. The film’s aesthetic—a kind of lo-fi, religious Americana with bright whites and unsettling reds—has potential but never coalesces into a cohesive visual language. There’s an attempt at building a Lynchian atmosphere, but without the mystery or psychological layering that makes Lynch’s work resonate.

Rebecca De Mornay, playing Clare’s eccentric and doting grandmother Gigi, brings a watchable energy to the film, though she is underutilized. Her character, who should be a grounding presence or perhaps a key to Clare’s past, remains more of a quirky footnote. Ryan Phillippe, as Timmons, a detective trying to make sense of the violence surrounding Clare’s town, is saddled with a bland role and dialogue that feels ripped from a second-rate procedural. And unfortunately, Frank Whaley appears in a minor but oddly staged role that leaves no lasting impression. It’ll leave you scratching your head, wondering why they even bothered to get him onboard if they weren’t going to do much with him. Such a waste of talent.

One of the biggest issues with Saint Clare is its handling of dissociative identity disorder (DID). Rather than treating the condition with care or insight, the film exploits it for horror clichés—yet again reducing a misunderstood and serious mental illness to a violent trope. This not only reinforces harmful stereotypes, but also robs Clare of psychological believability. Instead of showing how Clare developed into a killer or exploring the fractured pieces of her identity, the film simplifies her pathology into “she’s broken, and that’s scary.”

The violence in Saint Clare is plentiful, but it’s rarely impactful. Death scenes are stylized but hollow, filmed with a kind of detached irony that undercuts their potential horror. The film seems to think that juxtaposing religious iconography with murder is inherently profound, but without meaningful context or character motivation, it just feels empty.

What might have saved Saint Clare is a sharper script with deeper psychological insight. There’s fertile ground in the novel’s premise: a young girl shaped by religious repression, growing up in a moralistic society while hiding a monstrous side. Instead, the film skims the surface, relying on aesthetic tricks and provocative setups instead of probing questions. The dialogue, co-written by Peirone and American Psycho screenwriter Guinevere Turner, lacks the cutting wit or thematic bite of their earlier work. Rather than satirizing moral panic or exploring gendered violence, the film settles for hollow provocation.

There are glimmers of what could have been. A handful of scenes suggest a more cerebral, haunting film. Thorne’s performance occasionally transcends the material, especially in moments where Clare is alone, unmasked, and seemingly at war with herself. But these moments are fleeting, lost in a barrage of tonal whiplash and overwrought symbolism.

Even the climax feels rushed and unsatisfying. Without spoiling specifics, the final act tries to deliver both emotional catharsis and a twist, but succeeds at neither. Clare’s arc doesn’t evolve in any meaningful way, and the resolution raises more questions than it answers—without the benefit of mystery or ambiguity.

Saint Clare ends up feeling like a missed opportunity. The ingredients for a truly unsettling psychological thriller are here: a morally ambiguous protagonist, repressive religious environments, mental illness, and small-town secrets. But the film’s mishandling of tone, its lack of character depth, and its overreliance on provocative imagery without thematic follow-through render it inert.

At best, it’s a half-baked genre experiment that squanders its premise. At worst, it’s another example of pop-psych horror that uses mental illness as a plot device without doing the work to understand it. Bella Thorne deserves credit for going all in on a difficult role, but even she can’t salvage a film that is more interested in aesthetic than substance.

Saint Clare wants to be provocative and profound, but it ultimately plays like a disjointed reel of edgy ideas with no emotional core. There are flashes of potential buried beneath the surface, but they’re drowned out by inconsistent tone, shallow character work, and irresponsible storytelling.