TIFF 2021: Medusa
TIFF 2021Even with all of its commendably calculated imagery and puffed-up production design, Medusa is a bit of a strained clunker. It’s a colourful horror effort that constantly has one foot inside the horror realm and the other inside a musical/comedy. The contrasting tones often work, but not always, which feels more of a problem in execution than anything else. Medusa asserts that “God is Love” to the point that “God justifies Hate”, so the guns are out with some strong finger-pointing thematics. There is a strong target placed on religion’s role in radicalising the promotion of decent behaviour and ultimate compliance. That’s fine, and writer/director Anita Rocha da Silveira certainly isn’t off-base to explore a theme that asserts that religion has justified vicious ideology and hate in communities around the world. However, any poignancy in the social commentary is lost in the film’s shaky efforts to balance its character arcs while maintaining its consistent over-the-top style.
Medusa is a great visual accomplishment. It borrows heavily from Suspiria, with its female-centric school setting and loud primary colour palette. However, Da Silveira’s film also memorably alludes to moody, unnerving imagery from 1980s’ street gang films such as The Warriors. The sights of a masked ass-kicking female gang violently forcing sinners to repent in the unlit gutters of Sao Paolo is powerfully (and ironically) juxtaposed against the girls’ neon-lit, ultra-sweet onstage persona of a Christian-pop choir, which likens them more to the ‘Sparkle Motion’ girls from Donnie Darko. The ironic and two-faced nature of organised religion glowers over the film, like American History X meets Legally Blonde, leaving Medusa with strong and memorable resonating visuals – it’s a huge accomplishment.
But finding a flexible, moral centre in the middle of religious fundamentalism is Medusa’s end game, and that narrative responsibility falls on two darlings of the Christian all-women choir. Their personal journeys run parallel to their pursuit of an old victim of their gang. The whole thing is a bit of McGuffin that forces encounters, experiences, and inner soul-searching. The script fails to flesh any of this out smoothly, so the middle of the film drags and distracts without meaningfully building the two girls’ characters. As opposed to feeling a part of the girls’ journey through morality, the audience can really only apply its own understanding of right and wrong to what unfolds as opposed to feeling any genuine empathy or multi-dimensional understanding of the characters.
Medusa is an undeniably zesty look at and strongly satiric portrayal of a local congregation as modern Taliban-like, aggressive-outreach Christian fundamentalists for the social-media generation. For instance, ‘how to take a Christian selfie’ is an inspired and amusing example within Medusa’s crazy world of this type of indoctrination. Ultimately, it’s inconsistent albeit delightfully ambitious horror.