‘Medusa Deluxe’ review: Could this murder mystery be the sleep hit of the summer?

There are some films that gently welcome you in with a warm guiding hand, and there are films that thrust you into the deep end of their drama with a sharp shove to your spine. Medusa Deluxe is the latter, chucking audiences into the panic, gossip, and paranoia that infests the backstage of a regional hairdressing competition in England after one of the contending stylists is found scalped. If this description of the basic premise made you do a double take, I think you’ll love every unapologetically sordid moment of A24’s latest gem. 

After a series of shorts, writer/director Thomas Hardiman makes his feature debut with a wildly ambitious project. There is no central protagonist in Medusa Deluxe, but instead an ensemble of characters who collide with fear, frustration, jealousy, and sometimes profound empathy and love.

The concept of a murder investigation set at a rinky-dink hair competition forces low-stakes comedy to grapple with dark matters. These hairdressers treat winning and losing like life or death — even in the face of actual death. Their intensity is invigorating, but it’s also a bit ridiculous. As someone in the movie points out, it’s just hair, and winning this competition isn’t a life-changing event. It is, however, validation in a field populated by misfits and the marginalized. 

But perhaps most impressive is how this ensemble cast does not just act but performs a figurative ballet, moving in sync with a camera that never stops bobbing and weaving through the whole of the backstage. Cinematography Robbie Ryan (Slow West, The Favourite) doesn’t just make us a fly on the wall. Shot in real time for much of its runtime, Medusa Deluxe makes us a silent witness who strides alongside snarling hairdressers, skittish models, sulking security guards, and horrified friends and foes of the polarizing dead man. 

Medusa Deluxe is a macabre comedy that moves. 

The death in question is of a Turkish hairstylist named Mosca (John Alan Roberts), whose exasperated model Timba (Anita-Joy Uwajeh) goes for a cigarette break, only to return to find him dead on the floor, covered in blood and missing his scalp. The film begins after this ghoulish discovery, avoiding the gore and focusing on the messy emotional aftermath. 

Instead of Mosca’s grisly death scene, Medusa Deluxe kicks off with a sharp-tongued English stylist called Cleve (Clare Perkins) who won’t let an apparent murder get in the way of her finishing her design — at least so she can share it on social media. As she teases her model’s hair, she unfurls a merciless tirade about Mosca’s less admirable qualities, revealing her own malice against him. Her speech is as impassioned as it is brazenly harsh and sharply hilarious. When her model Angie (Lilit Lesser) pleads for a break, the camera follows the flustered young woman down dark hallways, upstairs, and into a green room, where the whole bloody business is being discussed by a gaggle of models whose emotions run from curious to concerned to frustrated that the competition is now in jeopardy. Here, too, there’s darkly grinning humor in how the brutal death of a colleague can be such an inconvenience. 

Some have called Medusa Deluxe a whodunnit. And there are elements of that subgenre, such as a collection of quirky characters trapped in one location, awaiting the solution to a murder mystery. However, there’s no detective to step audiences through the clues. Instead, Hardiman trusts Ryan’s camera to make the audience this detective, witnessing shady behavior and listening to secrets of past betrayals, present crimes, and potential future terror. But the who-done-it of it all isn’t as interesting as these characters, who are thinly sketched yet electrifyingly alive. 

Clare Perkins leads a riveting ensemble cast in Medusa Deluxe. 

While there is no lead in Medusa Deluxe, Perkins grabs the reins from her first frame. The rage and brash ambition of this working-class hard-ass make her not only a suspect but also a sharp foil to competitor Divine (Kayla Meikle), an immigrant from Benin, West Africa, who leans on her faith in times of trials. Where Cleve blusters, Divine blesses. And both of them rile Kendra (Harriet Webb), who has no patience for drama or speculation, and so delivers real talk with enviable comfort. 

The models, on the other hand, largely treat this murder investigation as a game, chasing about potential suspects and questioning them with the kind of confidence that implies these impossibly beautiful ladies truly see themselves as invincible. Meanwhile, the regional competition’s host/owner Rene (Darrell D’Silva) is falling apart at the seams, crying to a stunned security guard (Heider Ali) and Mosca’s devastated Latine lover Angel (Luke Pasqualino). 

Interestingly, each actor brings a different tone to the collective chorus of voices. Some play the film like it’s a comedy, delivering their lines with a bit of a wink. Others play the drama so hard you might think you slipped into a soap opera. Still, others carry a haunted quality that scratches at horror. Rather than being tonally unbalanced, Hardiman blends these together to illustrate the colliding perspective of his characters on this chaotic day. 

Amid this tangle of scenes and stories, Hardiman gives us glimpses of the lives of people who have been kicked to the fringe of British society but have hung on with their skill in crafting hair into a crown. For all the dark humor at play in the blasé attitude toward Mosca and the murder investigation, Hardiman has a core of empathy that reverberates throughout the film. The score by Toby Williams gives voice to feelings of tension with flickering percussion, whining strings, and a trembling rattle. 

Then, Hardiman gives us a conclusion that not only solves the mystery of Mosca but offers Cleve — the hardest of this bunch of survivors — a moment of reflection. It invites us all in to understand that the struggles that seem funny through the distance of comedy could mean life and death if you’re living them.

Medusa Deluxe is visually lush. 

Set in a rundown building with an unremarkable interior, it’s astonishing how full of splendor Medusa Deluxe is. A major part of this is Ryan’s cinematography. The 1.33:1 aspect ratio cramps the scene, a rebellion from the expected widescreen mise-en-scène; this framing, plus an abundance of claustrophobic close-ups, pushes audiences to share in the sense of being confined in this chaotic competition space. Yet the movement of the camera always feels smooth and in control, and the actors never mistakenly look into the lens. We are the fly on the wall, the ghost wandering the halls, the silent judge and jury of everyone who walks before us.

Dingy rooms are washed in light, creating vivid hues of yellow, green, and orange. Thoughtful framing and a flawless handheld follow allow us to appreciate the textures, from plumes of cigarette smoke to long locks of hair that bounce in motion or stretch sky-high in an impossible and magnificent work of art. It’s rare that a film’s hair stylist gets a title card in a movie’s trailer, yet Eugene Souleiman does, as does Ryan for his cinematography. This is righteous, as both have worked in collaboration with Hardiman to manifest something uniquely extraordinary. 

This is a hair competition, after all. But rather than a rapturous runway, Souleiman’s looks have to walk through grimy bathrooms, concrete stairways, and other banal settings. Some of these coiffures are fully formed and glorious, worshipped by Ryan’s swirling cinematography. Others are partially completed, sitting there as a glittering, frustrating reminder of the competition thwarted. Still, others are so bizarre and inconceivable that they echo the third act manifesto about the importance of this craft. It’s not just vanity. It’s not just victory. “This is the crown that you never take off,” one character quips, and Medusa Deluxe shows the fight to make every strand count. 

In the end, Medusa Deluxe is an extravagant, relentlessly propulsive, and wildly entertaining film, rich with provocative performances, jaw-dropping ambition, astounding visuals — both squalid and sublime — and a dizzying blend of dark humor and persistent empathy. Simply put, it’s a knockout and not to be missed. 

Medusa Deluxe opens in theaters Aug. 11.