Kae Alexander and Kayla Meikle in Medusa Deluxe (2022)
- Reviewed at the 2022 Locarno Film Festival.
Brittle as a split end, artificial as a rainbow ombré dye-job, British director Thomas Hardiman’s flashy, ornate debut Medusa Deluxe is set in the never knowingly subtle world of competitive hairdressing, on finals day, when one of the key contestants turns up dead.
Hardiman ups the gaudiness ante with a showily faked one-take approach. It adds another string to superstar DoP Robbie Ryan’s bow, and there is giddy fun to be had from a murder mystery that, snaking through the dressing rooms, bathrooms and corridors of a single maze-like location, unfolds in real time. But the flamboyant style is lathered atop a thinning plot that’s about as unconvincing as a combover, and as backstage catfights escalate – the scissors sharper than the quips – it’s hard not to think of the eternal hairdresser’s injunction against perming and colouring on the same day: there’s only so much one head can take.
The opening is a kinetic, synthetic joyride through an enormously magnified CGI landscape of styling tools, in which hairbrush bristles are thick as tree trunks. One such brush is wielded by temperamental, potty-mouthed stylist Cleve (Clare Perkins, formerly of EastEnders) who is primping her “fontange”, a wildly elaborate updo topped off by a fluorescent three-mast model ship. All but ignoring the poor girl sitting rigidly beneath her teetering creation, Cleve vents like an X-rated geyser to frenemy Divine (Kayla Meikle) about all the ways the just-discovered, scalped body of their chief rival Mosca is inconveniencing her.
They bicker over motive and killer – maybe one of the models or stylists, or the event’s silver-tongued, silver-ringed, silver-fox organiser, René (Darrell D’Silva)? He was in a relationship with Mosca before Mosca fell for Angel (Luke Pasqualino), with whom the dead man was, at the time of his gorily radical final haircut, raising a baby. And who is the surly security guard (Heider Ali), who keeps borrowing wet wipes to clean blood off the staff lockers?
Cleve and her catty, cartoonishly drawn gang are more interested in these questions than Hardiman’s screenplay is: the cursory plotting is highlighted when, in order to resolve, the film breaks its own rules with a well-choreographed but cheating flash-forward. And while Ryan’s cinematography, Fouad Gaber’s slyly hidden edits and composer Koreless’s restless, percussive score keep things clipping along, the claustrophobia of the one-take conceit, which works well in more grounded one-takers like Boiling Point (2021) and Victoria (2015), does the larger-than-life performances few favours. A style reliant on spontaneity doesn’t quite gel with a genre, like the murder mystery, that needs structure. It makes Medusa Deluxe, for all its diverting razzle-dazzle, a bit of a follicular folly.