Medusa review: Horror satire on religious fanaticism is well filmed but fails on the scares

2.5/5

Story: Mariana, a 21 year old with her girlfriends, trod the streets of Brazil in the night, looking to punish women who have sinned, and turn them to the lord’s side. Trying everything to resist temptation and be the “perfect woman”, they take matters into their own hands. After an injury to her face, Marianne soon becomes someone completely different. 

Review: It's always refreshing to watch a filmmaker make the best use of her artistic freedom and try to tell a story as different as possible. Only her second film, this is what Anita Rocha da Silveira does. Choosing a colourul, elusive and seldom hysterical style of storytelling, Medusa involves a number of volatile subjects including religious fanaticism, vicious evangelicalism and the idea of morality in Chistianity. 

The film’s opening, which reminds the viewer of John Carpenter or even Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, has a group of women in eerie, white masks attack another woman in the night. Punishing the woman for the “sins” she has committed, the group also films her answering the question, “Do you accept Jesus into your heart?”. The opening more or less sets up the tempo and style of the film, also giving an insight into what the filmmaker wants to express with her film. 

Mariana (Mariana Oliveira), a 21 year old who is part of the group of religious fanatics, gets injured in one of their vicious nights out, and has to live with a scar on her face. Having learnt to present her as a beautiful, dutiful woman to her husband, the scar takes a toll on her life and what she believes in. 

The young woman however, decides to find the whereabouts of a once famous female actor, Melissa Garcia (Bruna Linzmeyer), who had her face burned by religious fanatics for doing a nude scene. Obsessed with finding her, Mariana decides to take up a gig at a hospital ward, where the inhabitants are all comatose. She slowly unravels her life here, slowly treading the path of sin, while she is still obsessed with finding the actor. 

The film’s tone often seamlessly moves between satire, comedy and mystery, and also involves the usage of strong colours of blue and pink. Also using her freedom of artistic filmmaking, the director gets away by consciously letting out some parts of the story, which adds to the mystery in the film. While it feels like the film could have been shorter, the extended shots and additional shots adds to the allure of the film. 

Most actors deliver a decent performance in the film, but the film fails in telling the story of anyone other than the main lead. While there are a number of interesting characters such as Mariana’s best friend Michele (Lara Tremouroux) and commanding Pastor Guilherme (Thiago Fragoso), their stories and lives are conveniently forgotten as the film progresses. While the subtle humour works well, the film fails to do justice to the genre, and just isn’t scary. 

Anita Rocha da Silveira’s inclusion of certain shots such as the water draining the sink and implying sex with the help of moisturiser is a nod to the subtlety by which she intends to tell her story. The constant use of breaking the fourth wall also helps in showcasing the change the protagonist is going through, as she stumbles on to a certain freedom after having been told how to live most of her life. 

With the story also looking at how religious fanaticism is transforming into the modern day of social media and power politics, the power of satire can be seen in details such as a men’s group who are more militant than religious, waiting dormant for a hopeful religious revolution. 

Verdict: While Anita Rocha da Silveira’s film works in building an eerie and alluring spectacle for the viewer, the film fails to make use of all the characters introduced in the beginning. Running as a one woman show for most of its runtime, the film gets most of the satire and subtle comedy right, but ends up not being scary.