Film Review: No cuts in single-take hairdressing murder-mystery Medusa Deluxe
Luke Pasquallino stars in Medusa Deluxe
- Medusa Deluxe
- ★★★★☆
(15A) opens in the wake of an apparent murder at South London’s longest-running hairdressing competition, with Moksa, one of the hot favourites for big award, discovered not only dead but – gasp! – scalped by what we can only assume is a very bitter rival.
The list of candidates for the killer is long: Cleve (Clare Perkins) suspects that competition organiser Rene (Darell D’Silva) has been in cahoots with the serial-winning Moksa for years, while Moksa’s partner Angel (Luke Pasqualino) suspects that Moksa has been playing away with the hunky Patricio (Nicholas Karimi).
Writer-director Thomas Hardiman has plenty of fun creating a spoof murder-mystery set in the extravagant world of extreme hairdressing; not content with that, he and cinematographer Robbie Ryan combine to deliver a technically brilliant production that is comprised of one single take, with a host of characters wandering in and out of the scene and intersecting with one another in the labyrinthine theatre where the hairdressing competition is held.
Indeed, Medusa Deluxe is a little too clever for its own good, for all the tracking shots following characters tend to slow the pace down unnecessarily; that aside, however, this is a smart, sassy and blackly comic feature-length debut that marks Hardiman as a talent to watch. (cinema release)
