In the opening scene of Medusa—Brazilian writer/director Anita Rocha da Silveira’s sophomore film—a woman writhes passionately during a manic, sensual dance routine. Set to a pulsing synth track and soaked by red and green lighting, the dancer gyrates, tumbles and squirms, only to have the camera pull back to reveal that the performer is confined behind the glass of a smartphone’s screen. The viewer, a young woman, rides on a deserted bus, and the video provides her sole source of illumination. When she disembarks, the empty streets she traverses begin to echo with a menacing hissing sound, a signal that imminent danger surrounds her. She runs, but is successfully chased down by an organized gang donning white plastic masks. They beat her to a pulp and shout accusations concerning her sexual history. As they hurl insults—“Slut!” “Homewrecker!” “Whore!”—their voices reveal a feminine quiver. Their silhouettes and long, perfect hair signal their womanhood, and they’ve clearly come to “cleanse” the city of women who dare defy conservative gender roles. As their victim lies whimpering, one of the assailants whips out her cell phone, begins recording and asks: “Do you promise to accept Jesus into your heart?”
So begins Medusa, a future-set dystopian fantasy that leans into the current tenets of misogyny upheld by the far-right. The film acts as a giallo thriller, a modern update to Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames and the latest entry in Brazil’s anti-Bolsonaro fantasy canon. Yet for all of these fascinating themes and well-executed nods, Medusa still feels narratively slight. The protagonist, Mari (Mari Oliviera, who also starred in da Silveira’s debut Kill Me Please), is part of the girl gang (who perform in an Evangelical musical troupe by day)—that is, until her face is scarred during a “slut” bashing gone wrong. Dismayed by her disfiguration, she becomes obsessed with the local legend of Melissa, whose promiscuity was punished by her face being set on fire. Though Mari tells her vigilante crew that she will hunt down Melissa to post a picture of her burned, aging face for all to ridicule on social media, she actually begins to form a kinship with the pseudo-mythic figure—and finds herself falling for a sinful “worldly” person in the process.
Several recent films from Brazil have also commented on Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency and the country’s descent into far-right extremism. Bacarau, the impressive 2019 feat from co-directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, chronicles an entire village being scrubbed from Google Maps for the convenience of human poachers; Iuli Gerbase’s eerily prescient The Pink Cloud works as a pre-COVID pandemic allegory; Sundance’s Marte Um specifically looks at the night of Bolsonaro’s election with a sci-fi slant. Medusa enters an established yet ever-growing Brazilian canon that speculates on the sinister potential of the very near future, particularly as it threatens those marginalized among lines of class, race and gender.