Director: Thomas Hardiman (UK). Year of Release; 2022
It’s the final of some big hairdressing competition and Mosca, one of the competitors, has been found dead, scalped, in the cloakroom. In the antechamber, the other competitors discuss the recent arrival of the police, complaining that they won’t be allowed to go home before they’ve given evidence. Meanwhile they bitch about the other hairdressers and how they were never really in the running to win anyway.
We meet the different characters (and there are a LOT of different characters), one by one. There’s Cleve, the mouthy one who is working on an elaborate multi-storey haircut which she calls a frontage. Then there’s Divine, the one who is getting increasingly religious, Kegdra, the other one, and Rene, the silver-haired organiser of the competition. Then there’s Angel, the Colombian who comes carrying a baby, who had been in a relationship with the dead man.
Then there are the various models. The one who complains about being stereotyped, of being told tales about Ghana, although she’s from Catford and her family is from Senegal. The vaguely oriental looking one with multi-coloured hair who is so covered in so much glitter and make-up that she needs what looks like industrial chemicals to bring back her original skin. Or the one who has a ship embedded into her hair and ends up severely burning herself when she needs a fag.
These models are largely voiceless, which may be a comment on their role in the hairdressing hierarchy or may be that we’ve introduced so many characters already that giving the models any agency would be to overload the brain cells of the viewers. Meanwhile a security guard keeps popping in asking for wet wipes as he tries to clean the blood off his locker. Various other people flit in and out talking about drug deals. It’s all highly exhausting.
It is possibly a neat conceit, to have a murder mystery that doesn’t focus in on a detective, or even on anyone trying to find out what’s actually happened. The problem is that this requires us to be interested in the attendant lords who we instead. I can see how this could work. But for this particular film, it didn’t really do much for me. Instead I found myself asking, why bring in the murder at all, when the camera seems more interested in the dazzling haircuts?
The one thing Medusa Deluxe has is its Maguffin. The film seems to be taken in one straight shot. Not like Rope, where Alfred Hitchcock placed his cameras in one place and had his actors walk in front of them when he needed to change the reel. Not like Victoria, where the camera followed the title character through Berlin, and apparently was taken in a single shot, which was all the more impressive for her tricky piano playing in the middle of the film.
Rather than follow a single character, Medusa Deluxe goes wherever the wind takes it, moving from one character to another at will. This can be exhausting, and means that we don’t really get to experience enough of each character to invest much emotion in them (or is this because they are underwritten and fairly superficial?) Either way, this is a film more to be admired than loved. You are impressed by what it does, without maintaining too much interest in what’s happening.
Here, the single shot is highlighted by the fact that the action is taking place in a multi-storeyed labyrinthine building where we’re never quite sure exactly floor we’re on. So as we’re passed on from one character to another, we occasionally see rooms which look vaguely familiar, before heading once more into a drab corridor. At the very least, it gives the impression that despite the enclosed space, we’re moving through a vast area. It also starts to get pretty repetitive.
A review of Medusa Deluxe accurately noted that “the Whodunnit is awash with a flood of names, gossip, outfits and movement”. And maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it’s not them but me, but out of this long list I only mildly care about movement, and then not much. I’m perfectly happy to accept that I’m not really the target audience for a thriller where the mystery plays second fiddle to the hairdressing industry, not something in which I have too much interest.
Ultimately, the different parts of the film pull too much in conflicting directions. The illusion of a one-shot film is a neat idea but not really suited to the format of a thriller which needs a certain about of tension and defined characters. So much time is spent gazing at the spectacle that the murder mystery is increasingly forced backstage, to an extent that you wonder what is the point of it all.
I wanted to like Medusa Deluxe, and it did look good, but in the end it became so imbued with the hairdressers’ gossip that it lost all substance. In the end, it all becomes a bit boring. This does not mean that this is an unenjoyable film, even if it didn’t do enough for me. You get the feeling that there’s a good idea here waiting for someone to do something with it. The fact that we didn’t quite there doesn’t mean that it wasn’t worth the try.
CinePhil 