'Medusa Deluxe' evaluate: Might this homicide thriller be the sleep hit of the summer time?

There are some films that lightly welcome you in with a heat guiding hand, and there are films that thrust you into the deep finish of their drama with a pointy shove to your backbone. Medusa Deluxe is the latter, chucking audiences into the panic, gossip, and paranoia that infests the backstage of a regional hairdressing competitors in England after one of many contending stylists is discovered scalped. If this description of the essential premise made you do a double take, I feel you will love each unapologetically sordid second of A24’s newest gem.

After a sequence of shorts, author/director Thomas Hardiman makes his function debut with a wildly formidable challenge. There is no such thing as a central protagonist in Medusa Deluxe, however as an alternative an ensemble of characters who collide with worry, frustration, jealousy, and typically profound empathy and love.

The idea of a homicide investigation set at a rinky-dink hair competitors forces low-stakes comedy to grapple with darkish issues. These hairdressers deal with successful and dropping like life or dying — even within the face of precise dying. Their depth is invigorating, but it surely’s additionally a bit ridiculous. As somebody within the film factors out, it is simply hair, and successful this competitors is not a life-changing occasion. It’s, nevertheless, validation in a area populated by misfits and the marginalized.

Medusa Deluxe is a macabre comedy that strikes.

Darrell D’Silva as Rene in “Medusa Deluxe.”
Credit score: A24

The dying in query is of a Turkish hairstylist named Mosca (John Alan Roberts), whose exasperated mannequin Timba (Anita-Pleasure Uwajeh) goes for a cigarette break, solely to return to seek out him useless on the ground, lined in blood and lacking his scalp. The movie begins after this ghoulish discovery, avoiding the gore and specializing in the messy emotional aftermath.

As an alternative of Mosca’s grisly dying scene, Medusa Deluxe kicks off with a sharp-tongued English stylist referred to as Cleve (Clare Perkins) who will not let an obvious homicide get in the way in which of her ending her design — no less than so she will share it on social media. As she teases her mannequin’s hair, she unfurls a cruel tirade about Mosca’s much less admirable qualities, revealing her personal malice in opposition to him. Her speech is as impassioned as it’s overtly harsh and sharply hilarious. When her mannequin Angie (Lilit Lesser) pleads for a break, the digital camera follows the flustered younger girl down darkish hallways, upstairs, and right into a inexperienced room, the place the entire bloody enterprise is being mentioned by a gaggle of fashions whose feelings run from curious to involved to annoyed that the competitors is now in jeopardy. Right here, too, there’s darkly grinning humor in how the brutal dying of a colleague might be such an inconvenience.

Some have referred to as Medusa Deluxe a whodunnit. And there are parts of that subgenre, equivalent to a group of quirky characters trapped in a single location, awaiting the answer to a homicide thriller. Nonetheless, there is no detective to step audiences by means of the clues. As an alternative, Hardiman trusts Ryan’s digital camera to make the viewers this detective, witnessing shady habits and listening to secrets and techniques of previous betrayals, current crimes, and potential future terror. However the who-done-it of all of it is not as fascinating as these characters, who’re thinly sketched but electrifyingly alive.

Clare Perkins leads a riveting ensemble forged in Medusa Deluxe.

Clare Perkins as Cleve and Lilit Lesser as Angie in “Medusa Deluxe.”
Credit score: A24

Whereas there isn’t any lead in Medusa Deluxe, Perkins grabs the reins from her first body. The trend and brash ambition of this working-class hard-ass make her not solely a suspect but additionally a pointy foil to competitor Divine (Kayla Meikle), an immigrant from Benin, West Africa, who leans on her religion in instances of trials. The place Cleve blusters, Divine blesses. And each of them rile Kendra (Harriet Webb), who has no persistence for drama or hypothesis, and so delivers actual discuss with enviable consolation.

The fashions, however, largely deal with this homicide investigation as a sport, chasing about potential suspects and questioning them with the sort of confidence that suggests these impossibly lovely women actually see themselves as invincible. In the meantime, the regional competitors’s host/proprietor Rene (Darrell D’Silva) is falling aside on the seams, crying to a shocked safety guard (Heider Ali) and Mosca’s devastated Latine lover Angel (Luke Pasqualino).

Curiously, every actor brings a special tone to the collective refrain of voices. Some play the movie prefer it’s a comedy, delivering their traces with a little bit of a wink. Others play the drama so laborious you may suppose you slipped right into a cleaning soap opera. Nonetheless, others carry a haunted high quality that scratches at horror. Moderately than being tonally unbalanced, Hardiman blends these collectively as an instance the colliding perspective of his characters on this chaotic day.

Amid this tangle of scenes and tales, Hardiman provides us glimpses of the lives of people that have been kicked to the perimeter of British society however have held on with their talent in crafting hair right into a crown. For all of the darkish humor at play within the blasé perspective towards Mosca and the homicide investigation, Hardiman has a core of empathy that reverberates all through the movie. The rating by Toby Williams provides voice to emotions of stress with flickering percussion, whining strings, and a trembling rattle.

Then, Hardiman provides us a conclusion that not solely solves the thriller of Mosca however affords Cleve — the toughest of this bunch of survivors — a second of reflection. It invitations us all in to grasp that the struggles that appear humorous by means of the space of comedy might imply life and dying if you happen to’re residing them.

Medusa Deluxe is visually lush.

Kae Alexander as Inez and Kayla Meikle as Divine in “Medusa Deluxe.”
Credit score: A24

Set in a rundown constructing with an unremarkable inside, it is astonishing how stuffed with splendor Medusa Deluxe is. A significant a part of that is Ryan’s cinematography. The 1.33:1 side ratio cramps the scene, a rebel from the anticipated widescreen mise-en-scène; this framing, plus an abundance of claustrophobic close-ups, pushes audiences to share within the sense of being confined on this chaotic competitors area. But the motion of the digital camera at all times feels easy and in management, and the actors by no means mistakenly look into the lens. We’re the fly on the wall, the ghost wandering the halls, the silent decide and jury of everybody who walks earlier than us.

Dingy rooms are washed in mild, creating vivid hues of yellow, inexperienced, and orange. Considerate framing and a flawless handheld comply with enable us to understand the textures, from plumes of cigarette smoke to lengthy locks of hair that bounce in movement or stretch sky-high in an inconceivable and luxurious murals. It is uncommon {that a} movie’s hair stylist will get a title card in a film’s trailer, but Eugene Souleiman does, as does Ryan for his cinematography. That is righteous, as each have labored in collaboration with Hardiman to manifest one thing uniquely extraordinary.

This can be a hair competitors, in any case. However slightly than a rapturous runway, Souleiman’s appears must stroll by means of dirty loos, concrete stairways, and different banal settings. A few of these coiffures are totally fashioned and superb, worshipped by Ryan’s swirling cinematography. Others are partially accomplished, sitting there as a glittering, irritating reminder of the competitors thwarted. Nonetheless, others are so weird and inconceivable that they echo the third act manifesto in regards to the significance of this craft. It isn’t simply vainness. It isn’t simply victory. “That is the crown that you just by no means take off,” one character quips, and Medusa Deluxe exhibits the battle to make each strand rely.

Ultimately, Medusa Deluxe is an extravagant, relentlessly propulsive, and wildly entertaining movie, wealthy with provocative performances, jaw-dropping ambition, astounding visuals — each squalid and stylish — and a dizzying mix of darkish humor and protracted empathy. Merely put, it is a knockout and to not be missed.

Medusa Deluxe opens in theaters Aug. 11.