Movie Review: SAINT CLARE

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: July 18th, 2025 / 01:30 AM

SAINT CLARE movie review | ©2025 Quiver Distribution

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Bella Thorne, Ryan Phillippe, Rebecca De Mornay, Frank Whaley, Joy Rovaris, Jan Luis Castellanos, Dylan Flashner, Bart Johnson, Joel Michaely, Erica Dasher
Writers: Mitzi Peirone and Guinevere Turner, based on the novel CLARE AT SIXTEEN by Don Roff
Director: Mitzi Peirone
Distributor: Quiver Distribution
Release Date: July 18, 2025 (theatrical, digital, VOD)

SAINT CLARE the movie is based on Don Roff’s 2021 novel CLARE AT SIXTEEN. From a synopsis of the book, this seems like a loose adaptation, starting with the fact that the film’s Clare (Bella Thorne) is old enough to be in college and very religious.

The movie begins with Clare declaring in voiceover, “Everything I have said and done has been in the hands of God. I was born to do this. I am not afraid.”

We see a flashback to Clare’s childhood, when she saves a woman by killing the man who is choking her to death. Since then, Clare has been driven to seek out and eliminate men whom she (and we) can reasonably conclude to be rapists.

But lately, Clare has been having some problems. She is questioning whether she is strong enough to continue her calling. She has been haunted for the last month by the chatty ghost of Mailman Bob (Frank Whaley), who died in a drunken fall. And Clare has attracted the attention of police detective Timmons (Ryan Phillippe), who is investigating the death of Clare’s most recent victim (Bart Johnson).

Then a separate incident draws Clare’s attention to the disappearances of many local young women.

So, we are faced with several mysteries. There’s the one that Clare is pursuing, and then there is the mystery of Clare herself.

Director Mitzi Peirone, who wrote the screenplay with Guinevere Turner, creates a suitably shadowy ambience, punctuated with beauty, blood and Christian iconography. Peirone also establishes a sense of wary discomfort, so that we are inclined to side with Clare in her quiet outrage.

Because Clare is shown to be correct when she acts lethally, it’s unclear whether we’re meant to wonder about her sanity. Despite a somewhat surreal mood, Mailman Bob knows too much about things that Clare can’t intuit for him to simply be a hallucination, which gives SAINT CLARE a supernatural dimension.

This helps smooth over a few plot coincidences, though it’s harder to accept the explanation that Clare has made all her previous murders look like suicides or accidents, when there’s no attempt to disguise the one at the start.

Thorne is charismatic, vividly determined and oddly vulnerable, making Clare a compelling protagonist. Phillippe gives Timmons a bemused tolerance for weirdness and Whaley hits exactly the right notes as Bob, chipper but not unbearable. Rebecca De Mornay has some effective sequences as Clare’s increasingly anxious grandmother.

SAINT CLARE overall carries us along, but it undercuts itself when it tries for moral ambiguity. Yes, killing people is overall wrong, but when it is consistently presented as necessary in defense of self or others, there’s not much argument to be had. The movie might be better if it didn’t attempt to be more profound than its text allows.

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