Rating: NR | Runtime: 92 minutes
Release Date: July 18th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Quiver Distribution
Director(s): Mitzi Peirone
Writer(s): Mitzi Peirone and Guinevere Turner / Don Roff (novel Clare at Sixteen)

I was born to do this.

Her first murder was an act of self-defense. What should have hailed this pre-teen as a hero, though, also had the potential to mark her as a monster. And yet her victim was a bad man hellbent on killing every girl on her camping retreat. The same goes for each subsequent victim she’s become highly adept at making look like suicides too. So, despite what the world might believe (and she often believes it too), Clare Bleecker (Bella Thorne) mustn’t stop. Just like Joan of Arc before her, she’s doing the work of God. She’s ridding society of misogynists, rapists, and murderers of innocent people. Only when caught will she know her service to God has been fulfilled.

It’s an intriguing premise that author Don Roff has fashioned into a book series about to receive its fourth installment. Everything I see about the novel bills it as a darkly comical teen romp—the “love child of Faith from Buffy and Dexter Morgan.” The film, however, avoids all mention of “comedy” to lean solely into the mystery thriller aspect of its subject matter: a four-decades-old string of local disappearances wherein the bodies of the young women taken were never recovered. While shifting tone isn’t necessarily a mistake, director Mitzi Peirone and co-writer Guinevere Turner’s Saint Clare is at its best when it’s not taking itself so seriously.

Case and point: Mr. Edwards (Joel Michaely). Despite the tragedies befalling this community, he’s undaunted about mounting a gender-bending adaptation of Deathtrap. Over-the-top flamboyant and disinterested in anyone who dares be out of synch with his demands, his presence serves as a balm against the otherwise dour whodunnit that simply never pops. Part of this is the messy nature in which that mystery unfolds (the red herrings sprinkled throughout prove more akin to plot holes since the truth rarely ever explains their maybe roles in the crime beyond a final, final reveal that provides partial cover without bothering to fully make it all make sense). The other part is an overall sense of incompleteness where it concerns our protagonist.

There are allusions to Clare having dissociative personality disorder, but it is neither elaborated on or mentioned—unless you count her admitting she blacked out during Detective Timmons’ (Ryan Phillippe) interrogation and remembers nothing about it. She talks to the ghost of a prior “victim” (it’s difficult not to use quotes when discussing Frank Whaley’s Bob after discovering how he died), but he’s less a “personality” than embodiment of her conscience. And, despite constantly repeating the mantra that everything she does is in service of God, we never receive clarity about this so-called piousness. She prays once and has a hallucination, but this aspect is just another seemingly important piece of the character’s mythology that we’re merely asked to take on faith ourselves.

I’d be more inclined to do so if Saint Clare allowed itself to be as absurd as Mr. Edwards. Because a film can’t take itself as seriously as this one without an airtight plot I can meet at its level. If you’re able to laugh at yourself, however, I can excuse the flimsy narrative connections and wild leaps forward without presenting Clare’s thought process from point A to B. There’s a laughable sequence that moves from her confronting a fellow student (Jan Luis Castellanos’ Truman) in a dark room to her grandmother (Rebecca De Mornay’s Gigi) confronting him at a vigil to Clare suddenly being in the belly of the beast. Instead of letting us laugh at the overwrought melodrama, the film truly believes it provided crucial exposition when it could have just jump cut over Gigi entirely.

It’s too bad because I’m a big fan of Peirone’s debut Braid. That’s why I sought this one out. It embraced leaving plausibility behind so well that its weird this one isn’t benefitting from the same. Because it has its merits. Whaley and De Mornay are great. The reveal of who’s behind the sex trafficking plot probably shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did, but I must give credit for doing so anyway. And, while effective in the lead role, Thorne would have killed it if given a bit more leeway insofar as allowing her earnestness to play for intentional laughs. Because her classmates earned too much unintentional laughter with dialogue that made it seem there was a non-zero chance Saint Clare would be revealed as a stage play itself. That kind of fourth wall breaking would have been welcome.

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Bella Thorne as “Clare Bleecker” in the mystery thriller SAINT CLARE, a Quiver Distribution release. Photo courtesy of Quiver Distribution.