Medusa (Anita Rocha de Silveira, 2021) (Patreon)

For CINEMA SCOPE's 2021 TIFF Coverage:

It’s spoiling nothing to mention that Medusa, the sophomore film from Brazil’s Anita Rocha de Silveira, ends with a series of blood-curdling screams. In a way, this perfectly sums up the movie as a whole. De Silveira has produced a stylish, disturbing piece of psychological / political horror, one that sometimes lacks focus or even coherence but is nevertheless propelled by its maker’s all-consuming rage. At times Medusa seems allegorical – some have compared it with Betrand Bonello’s recent efforts, Nocturama and Zombi Child– but just as often it exhibits a knowing, Black Mirror-style glimpse of a moment not so far removed from the dystopian present.

The opening sequence is a masterful bit of self-contained visual storytelling, and lays out what could have been Medusa’s controlling metaphor. We see a wide-open eye, bathed in the harsh, saturated reds and greens of classic giallo. The camera pulls back to show that we are watching an abstract, erotic dance, and then pulls back even further to show that we are actually watching a clip on someone’s smartphone. Before long, a group of eight Purge-masked young girls appear in gang formation, beating this “sinner” down in the street and forcing her to declare her love for Jesus on camera. Later, the leader of the girls, Michele (Lara Tremouroux) posts the video on Instagram, where it receives thousands of immediate likes.

What de Silveira is showing us is Brazil as a Christian-fascist state, the overt realization of Bolsonaro’s dreams. The gang is a girl-clique that spends its daylight hours at exclusive far-right evangelical school. At night, they take it upon themselves to thrash and humiliate any woman they deem “impure,” “perverted,” a “homewrecker” or a “Jezebel.” Before long, Medusa singles out a young nursing student, Mariana (Mariana Oliveira) whose face is scarred during a scuffle. This sets her apart from the group, and soon she is questioning their ideology or, as the other girls call it, “getting sloppy.”

De Silveira made Medusa is though she feared she’d never get to direct again – not an unreasonable assumption given the right-wing government’s attacks on Brazilian film culture. Held together by searing colors and a sense of all-pervasive threat, Medusa is a distractible film, focusing on group dynamics one moment, the inner psyche of Mariana the next, and eventually introducing an inchoate resistance movement comprised of raves and orgies. Bold stylistic gestures drift in and out of view, and multiple sources of influence (Argento, Carpenter, Lucile Hadžihalilović, and Gaspar Noé, among others). But despite its scattershot attack, Medusa eventually comprises something like a feminist manifesto, a bevy of ideas primarily intended to knock the viewer upside the head.