Medusa (2021 | Brazil | 128 minutes | Anita Rocha da Silveira)
By day, best friends Mari and Michele are devout women in a Christian pop group called Michele and the Treasures of the Lord. They sing bubblegum pop songs about Jesus and Michele runs a YouTube channel that tells young, God-fearing women how to take the most holy selfies. The wrong angles or filters and you might be assumed to be a jezebel or whore. By night, they channel their Christian devotion into a girl gang that menaces the streets of Brazil, eager to attack any woman that they perceive to be sinful. If you’re pretty and not overtly Christian, it’s best to keep some mace in your purse. The scene that opens this movie features an innocent woman attacked and beaten until she promises to devote her life to Jesus. Her tears and pleas for mercy are recorded and uploaded online.
Control is a theme that runs through this movie a lot. Mari (Mariana Oliveira) and Michele feel the need to control others through fear and terror because their church demands their total devotion. The girl gang takes inspiration from an urban legend about a beautiful homewrecker whose face is permanently damaged from being burned in an attack. Of course it’s impossible for the two ladies to think anything other than what they are doing at night is just. What would Jesus do?
Things go horribly awry when the girl gang sets their sights on a young woman who is able to fight back and slashes Mari’s face. It was karmically inevitable but Mari’s life is uprooted because the scar across her face disrupts her natural beauty. Soon, she’s too hideous for the plastic surgery clinic where she works and is forced to take a job in another clinic where she sees her job functions as demeaning.
The myth of Medusa has taken on contemporary relevance because one telling has Medusa being punished by the goddess Athena for breaking her vows of celibacy by having her hair replaced with snakes and anyone who looked at her would become petrified. Was this history’s first slut-shaming? It’s easy to see why this story would be so appealing to a 21st century filmmaker.
Regardless, Medusa is one of the most thrilling and entertaining movies I’ve seen this year. Its cinematography and visual style is appealing, the acting is great, and it explores deep themes of sin and karma and control and submission. It’s a biting satire and truly menacing at times while disrupting the slasher flick genre. Anita Rocha da Silveira is a filmmaker to keep an eye on. I can’t wait to see what she does next.
Medusa is playing at the Grand Illusion Theater from Friday, August 5 through Wednesday, August 17. Tickets and more info can be found here.