‘Medusa Deluxe’: A24’s One-Shot Murder Mystery With Great Hair
There’s been a scalping at a Northern England hairdressing competition.
It’s all any of the hairdressers — “hair artists” might be a better description, given the towering Marie Antoinette-level coifs and rainbow-colored cascades and expertly sculpted geometric ‘dos they’ve designed — can talk about. The victim is Mosca, the presumed frontrunner before being found dead and mutilated. No one’s canceled the event, however, and his peers are prepping their models for the runway. The show must go on.
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As for the suspects — well, where do we start? There is Rene (Darrell D’Silva), the silver-maned head of the event who used to be Mosca’s lover, and his volatile fellow judge, Kendra (Harriet Webb). Two other contestants, the combative Cleve (Clare Perkins) and the religiously devout Divine (Kayla Meikle), would certainly benefit from their superior peer being out of the running. Mosca’s current partner, Angel (Luke Pasqualino), seems innocent enough, especially since he’s carting their adorable baby around. But there are rumors that the two of them were involved in some shenanigans around black-market hair-loss products, so he may have had a motive. You certainly can’t count out Gac (Heider Ali), the world’s most conspicuously creepy security guard. Or maybe the culprit is just some random homicidal maniac who’s stalking the premises, and had simply picked out Mosca as someone who should be styling hair today, and gone tomorrow….
This is the central novelty behind the premise of Medusa Deluxe: a murder mystery set in the dog-perms-dog world of a regional hairstyling contest. And it would have been the primary attraction to this quirky tweak on the well-worn whodunit genre, had British writer-director Thomas Hardiman not added another degree of difficulty into the proceedings by shooting the entire thing in a single shot. Make that “a single shot,” since you can tell that several long, long, looooong takes have been slyly cut together to appear as one seamless one, which only makes the technical virtuosity of this directorial debut that much more impressive.
The real star here is cinematographer Robbie Ryan, a legend in his own time who’s shot everything from American Honey to Marriage Story to The Favourite. His camera bobs among the bobs and weaves between the weaves, ducking and dodging actors as they fight, following behind them as they exit one room and enter another. And the real mystery is not who killed Mosca, but rather: How did the editing team sustain the illusion of an unbroken trek through subterranean hallways, across parking lots, and around the contestants themselves with such dexterity? (It’s not surprising that A24 picked up this import after a few high-profile festival appearances.)
So much energy and effort has gone in to navigating the movie’s treacherous obstacle course and marshaling the troops that someone seems to have forgotten that a comprehensible story would be needed to tie all of it together, and this is where Medusa Deluxe starts to turn to stone. Precious little attention gets paid to the ins and outs of the whodunit itself. Clever bits of dialogue don’t feel like they come from the mouths of actual characters. Long, overly chatty patches offer little clarity and even less forward momentum; worse, they don’t offer much of a showcase for the actors either, despite Perkins’ gift for adding a spritz of venom to her exchanges. As you try to piece the various bits of information together, the whole thing starts to seem less like a movie and more like an exercise — a one-shot wonder doubling as a one-note narrative. There’s lots of hair there in Hardiman’s debut, but no there there. You leave feeling more teased than the models’ wigs.
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