Few, if any, single-shot movies ever justify the conceit. In fact, most of them do their material a disservice through the distraction that emerges naturally from the trickery. In other words, audiences are often put into the position of looking for the seams in the filmmaking, on the hunt for evidence of the artifice. In the case of writer-director Thomas Hardiman’s Medusa Deluxe, though, artifice is the entire raison d’être.
Set within the backstages of a cutthroat hairdressing competition, the film opens with a riled-up Cleve (played with dazzling fire by Clare Perkins) recounting the story’s inciting incident while fussing over a disgruntled model’s coif. Stylist Mosca (John Alan Roberts), presumed to be heavy competition, has not only been discovered dead, but also scalped. The remaining contestants are now sheltering in place and turbo-gossiping about who his presumed murderer could possibly be. At the same time, Rene (Darrell D’Silva) is working to summon Mosca’s husband, Angel (Luke Pasqualino), to the scene to break the news that the love of his life is dead—and that he was sleeping with him on the sly. It all only gets more lurid from there.
Hardiman, making his feature debut, makes no attempt to evade the basic surfaceness of his intentions, which is, at least, a welcome admission of willful frivolity. But at the same time, in utilizing Robbie Ryan’s roving cinematography as an overt mirror of the subject matter’s fixation on follicle folly, he can’t help but lapse into an almost accidental mode of prestige.
Cleve, in her opening monologue, may be theatrically flailing about in her attempt to affix an ostentatious ship atop her model’s turbulent mane-wave, but her delivery of the frankly ludicrous dialogue is ultimately quite earnest, almost grounded. Ditto Anita-Joy Uwajeh as Mosca’s hardly distraught model, Timba, recounting her late stylist’s culturally imperialist, mansplainy lecturing on traditional Ghanian hairstyles with the import of late-stage wokedom.
Ultimately, the plainly mincing Pasqualino is the only actor who really commits to the bit of intentional camp, which, per Sontag, doesn’t even exist, but if it does one would hope it comes in the form of a murder mystery about sparring hair architects that includes, among its bon mots, “You Pantene Pro-V c***!” In the end, though, Hardiman winds up too careful about making sure the mystery component pays off, and that element winds up being the least compelling component. In that sense, Medusa Deluxe shares with Rian Johnson’s Knives Out films the sense that the ingredients are all there and the intentions are clear, but somehow, somewhere along the way emerges an overall unwillingness to give into supreme superficiality.
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