Medusa Deluxe

I randomly booked into see this film, knowing basically nothing about it apart from the two word synopsis "murder, hairdressing". Sign me up! It's got to be one of the most entertaining cinema experiences I've had in the last year.

Set backstage in a run-down events centre outside Preston bus-station, every character feels alive (a little stage-y perhaps). It's pretty funny, although it makes you wait for the darkest-of-dark humour to develop. The film is presented as a Children of Men-style real-time single shot and the camera's always following someone down a rabbit hole - it feels like there's always a lot more plot going on than perhaps there actually is. The whodunnit is not the most compelling thing about the film - it really nails it's atmosphere, characters, costumes and hair (naturally!)

It's beautifully filmed, soundtrack is great too - see it on the biggest screen you can find.

I wanted to watch a comedy and this film was listed as a comedy. First off, I am not adverse to what is called "black/dark comedy". Not at all. In fact I found "A Clockwork Orange" to be rife with "black/dark comedy". Also, thoroughly enjoyed "Tucker and Dale vs Evil". All that said, this film should not be listed in any genre of comedy. I watched it 3/4 through and there was not even one scene of any comedic merit. Nothing. In addition, the acting was often very bad, the dialogue was often awful and the overall story-line was disjointed and confusing. Not to mention the endless and TEDIOUS filler scenes of people going up or down stairs and walking through hallways. If you are looking for a comedy, skip this slop.

The one-take movie is a fun concept. But the fact still remains that if the script isn't good, the concept isn't going to cover up that fact. This was actually the first one-take film I've seen that I haven't enjoyed. All the other ones have had a great script to back up the concept. On this occasion though I wonder if they were using it to mask the weakness of what they had to work with, rather than doing it for purely artistic reasons.

The first thing a film has to do is make you care, and this one never did. I never found a character I could relate to or even enjoy their presence on screen. And I was never given a reason to care about the murder-mystery. We never meet the person who is murdered or even see them murdered. We are just told and then expected to spend 90 minutes desperately wondering whodunnit. That's not possible to do.

A one-take whodunnit should have been an absolute dream film for me to enjoy, but if the execution isn't there then it doesn't matter. This one was sadly a big misfire for me. 3/10.

Murder at the hairdressing competition. It's like the title Agatha Cristie forgot to write. We don't get a Poirot however, just a bunch of unlikeable characters chattering away for 90 minutes. We don't get to meet the victim, he's already cold when the movie opens, nor do we geet to meet the detectives working the case. We"re stuck with the models and collegues of the victim. It's a directorial choice offcourse. Just as the fact that the whole movie is filmed (or appears to be filmed) in one take. Which means a director going on an egotrip and an audience that has to suffer through endless shots of people walking through corridors. As you can tell I wasn't particularly taken with Medusa Deluxe. When we finally get to know whodunnit I was long past caring.

An ingenious comedy that imitates one-take productions, it is rather built on the basis of well-structured, assembled and recorded sequences that, in the style of Alfred Hitchcock's «Rope», resolve the transitions by means of dissolves and cuts between black shots and other resources. Unlike Hitchcockian drama, however, the camera is not static, but a mobile 'stylo' that enters dressing rooms, bathrooms, elevators, and a stage, and moves through stairs, corridors and gates.

As in «Rope», the plot revolves around the murder of a person (a hairdresser), whose scalp was torn off after being killed, in the middle of a celebration. Instead of a group of guests in an apartment, with the corpse cleverly hidden, here it is a center for events and shows in London, where a hairdressing contest is happening. So the form is the content and viceversa, they are two faces of the same complex portrait and complementary reflections on the modern lives of those who are usually out of frame in mainstream cinema.

The central cast looks like a postcard from Benetton with vibrant, vivacious and energetic actors of various ethnicities, made up of the fearsome hairdressers Cleve (Clare Perkins), Kendra (Harriet Webb) and Divine (Kayla Meikle) who compete for the grand prize, the promoter René (Darrell D'Silva), the Colombian hairdresser Angel (Luke Pasqualino), the models Angie (Lilit Lesser), Inez (Kae Alexander), Timba (Anita-Joy Uwajeh), and Etsy (Debris Stevenson), the security guards Gac (Hieder Ali) and Patricio (Nicholas Karimi), and the baby Pablo (twins Logan and James Porter). They all wait for the Police to arrive to question them about the murder of the fearsome Mosca (John Alan Roberts), but since the police arrive after the storm as the rainbow, we follow plenty scenes and dialogues of confrontation, persecution, violence, confessions, music and dancing.

Thomas Hardiman wrote and directed his first feature film and the result was this great film that makes us spend 101 minutes of fun, synergy and extravagance, without missing touching moments, guided by the admirable photography of Robbie Ryan and his operator Jake Whitehouse.