Saints Not To Be Praised

My thoughts on Saint Clare

Based, apparently quite loosely, on Don Roff’s 2012 YA novel “Clare at Sixteen,” Saint Clare tells the story of a troubled young college student named Clare (Bella Thorne) who has recently moved in with her grandmother (Rebecca de Mornay) in the wake of the latest of a series of traumatic events in her life. As it transpires, she believes herself to be divinely inspired—by the spirit of Joan of Arc, no less—to go out and kill people that she senses are out to threaten the good and the innocent. She demonstrates this early on when the world’s most obvious perv (Bart Johnson)—a characterization that even Sid Davis might deem a tad over the top—tries to lure her into her car for a ride. She agrees and quickly dispatches him, thereby landing herself in the midst of a murder investigation headed by Detective Rich (Ryan Philippe), who thinks that there is something off about her story. Clare thinks that there is something off as well and when she learns that the area has seen more than its share of missing women over the years, she begins to do some investigating of her own while at the same time co-starring in the upcoming school play, a gender-flipped production of Deathtrap, of all things.

Saint Clare, to put it extremely charitably, is pretty much a mess from start to finish. The basic conceit of a young woman using a combination of divine inspiration and evident mental instability to right various wrongs sounds interesting in theory, I suppose, but director Mitzi Perione, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Guinevere Turner, has transformed it into something that feels like a busted TV pilot, right down to the unnecessary side stories, such as all the Deathtrap nonsense, and ancillary characters such as the one played by Frank Whaley, who portrays the ghostly spirit of a man whose death continues to haunt Clare even though she did not actually kill him, per se. (Actually, this character, who serves as a sort of moral sounding board/guardian angel for Clare, is the most interesting one on display here, making it mystifying that Perione, having established him has a constant presence in the early going, essentially abandons him for most of the second half.) The mystery itself is not particularly interesting either and the big shocking reveal towards the end will not come as a surprise to anyone who makes it that far. Another big problem is that Thorne is kind of terrible in the central role—whatever inner drive and turmoil her character is feeling is simply not conveyed by the dull monotone that she uses for pretty much every single one of her line readings. All through Saint Clare, she spends her time acting as if she has better things to do than make any sort of commitment to the film, a feeling that will presumably be shared by anyone who actually sits down to watch it.