MEDUSA DELUXE - Mark Reviews Movies

Medusa Deluxe, A24

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 10, 2023

Set in the world of hairdressing, Medusa Deluxe presents itself as a murder mystery, but it's far more intriguing when the underlying story takes focus. There's a bit of irony to that, since writer/director Thomas Hardiman seems to have invented the whodunit conceit in order to make its study of the power dynamics between eccentric personalities more palatable. Instead, the gimmick comes across as an unnecessary and ultimately irrelevant distraction.

Also unnecessarily distracting, though, is Hardiman's approach to the movie. We're immediately thrown into the behind-the-scenes drama of a hairstyling competition in London, where hairdressers Cleve (a formidably tough Clare Perkins) and Divine (Kayla Meikle) are gossiping about the competition and their fellow competitors. Most of the talk is about the recent death—as in just about an hour or so ago—of one of the contestants, whose body was found by his model in the styling room where he had been working on her. The police are investigating the death, because the hairdresser was found scalped.

As the two women talk, Hardiman, making his feature debut, and cinematographer Robbie Ryan's camera floats around the room, sticking to Cleve and her model Angie (Lilit Lesser). Tensions rise between the stylists, since it turns out there had been bad blood between Cleve and the dead man that resulted in her breaking a glass bottle of conditioner over his head some years ago, and with that revelation, a frightened Angie walks out of the room. Without any cuts, the camera switches to follow Angie, who now has some gossip and suspicions to share with her fellow models, namely Inez (Kae Alexander) and Timba (Anita-Joy Uwajeh), who found her stylist dead in that most grisly scene not too long ago.

At this point, it becomes clear that Hardiman is presenting this tale in one, seemingly unbroken take. There have to be subtle cuts within it, given some moments of complete darkness and a visual effects shot with consequences that require an actor's appearance to change, but for the most part, the effect is seamless, apart from one transition through a window in which a person subtly skips a couple of frames. The technique itself is effective on a formal level, in other words, but the real concern is whether or not this stylistic gimmick matches and/or highlights the purpose of the story.

Simply put, it doesn't. More specifically, it removes much of the momentum and the sense of any stakes in this narrative, which is—ostensibly, at least—about a murder and the likelihood that a vicious killer is among this group. The approach doesn't help to establish the foundations of its mystery, since we're locked into a select group of characters, who can only piece together the details of the crime through hearsay and try to deduce who might have killed the stylist from a limited perspective. The clues are limited, too, such as Cleve's admission to previously attacking the now-dead man and a scene that establishes security guard Gac (Heider Ali) cleaning blood from his locker.

Obviously, the counter to this criticism is that the movie isn't actually about its mystery, although Hardiman's inclusion of that angle within this context raises even more issues about the movie's confused and/or misleading goals. We'll leave those alone, though, simply to observe that the movie's restricted perspective does its characters no favors, either.

There are plenty of potentially fascinating figures—from Cleve, to the born-again Christian Devine, to the secretive Gac, to the competition's founder Rene (Darrell D'Silva), to the possibly corrupt stylist Kendra (Harriet Webb)—and space for conflict between them, as well as about half a dozen others, here. Instead of taking its time to establish and develop these characters and those conflicts, though, the movie ends up wasting a lot of time with characters moving from one space to the next—sometimes down lengthy hallways or, in one case, down an elevator and across a parking lot (not to mention the return trip)—without any kind of information—character, plot, or otherwise—being communicated.

Basically, that intrinsic focus on motion only serves to remind us and emphasize how little this story actually moves forward in any way. Medusa Deluxe makes us feel stuck, like the characters, yes, but also within a mystery that can't show us the pieces of its puzzle (and doesn't matter by the end), with characters who are too preoccupied with said mystery to reveal much else about themselves, and inside a world that restricts what it can develop because of this technical gimmick.

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