Thomas Hardiman’s debut is a whodunnit staged as one unbroken shot around a hairdressing contest, and the shot is the achievement. It is funny, Clare Perkins is superb, and the murder is the least interesting thing in the building.
Thomas Hardiman’s first film begins after the murder. Mosca, one of the competitors in a regional hairdressing contest, has been found dead backstage, and the word going round is that he was scalped. Everyone else is still in the building: the other stylists, their models, the organiser and the security guard. Hardiman follows them for 101 minutes in what looks like one continuous shot, down corridors, into dressing rooms, outside and back. Medusa Deluxe is a real technical feat and a good deal of fun, and as a murder mystery it barely functions, which it seems to know.
Robbie Ryan, who shot The Favourite, operates the camera like a nosy guest. It follows one stylist until she passes another, then changes its mind and goes with the new one, so the film hands itself from character to character the way gossip does. Fouad Gaber’s editing is invisible in the strict sense: whatever joins there are, we did not find them, and the film is happier if you do not look. Gary Williamson’s venue is strip-lit corridors, dressing rooms lit by rows of bulbs and a stairwell nobody wants to use. It is the least glamorous building imaginable and the hair inside it is the most.
The hair is the reason to see it. The models carry structures rather than styles, most of them taller than the women underneath, and Cynthia Lawrence-John dresses them to match, in costumes built for a stage rather than a body. Whenever the film stops talking and lets the camera take in a finished head, it is briefly beautiful. It does not stop talking often.
Clare Perkins is the best thing in it. Cleve is a stylist who has been in the trade long enough to consider herself owed something, and Perkins delivers her lines in a rising, unstoppable stream, rounding on anyone who gives her an opening. She has a speech early on about the labour that goes into a single head of hair, hours of it, unpaid and unnoticed, and Perkins makes it a grievance, a boast and a confession at once. We laughed harder than we had at anything for weeks, and the reason was her timing: she reaches the end of a sentence, breathes, and starts the next before anyone can reply.
Kayla Meikle’s Devine is her sparring partner and her equal for volume. Harriet Webb’s Kendra is the one who watches everyone else and says less, and Debris Stevenson gives Etsy, a model, a bored watchfulness that is funnier than most of the written jokes. Darrell D’Silva plays Rene, the organiser, as a man for whom a corpse is chiefly a scheduling problem. Heider Ali’s Gac, the security guard, is the nearest thing to a detective, and he is as baffled as we are. Luke Pasqualino arrives as Mosca’s partner Angel, holding a baby, and is the only person in the building who appears to be grieving.
Here is the trouble. A whodunnit needs us to want to know, and about an hour in we realised we no longer did. Hardiman’s script hands out suspicion in turn, a jealous rival here, a rumour about a fling there, but nobody is ever in danger, nothing is at stake beyond a regional trophy, and the film’s own interest in the culprit is thin. The camera keeps moving because the format demands it, and there are stretches in the middle, walks along corridors while somebody explains something we already knew, where the movement is all there is. We were not bored, quite. We were waiting, and the film was walking.
One-shot films usually use the device for tension: a night that cannot be stopped, a shift going wrong. Hardiman uses it for talk, and for the pleasure of watching people who know each other too well trade insults in confined spaces. That is a legitimate choice and a rarer one. It also makes the murder a pretext, and a pretext will not hold 101 minutes on its own. Most critics have landed close to where we have: impressed by the shot, warm about the cast, unconvinced by the case.
See it if you like the sound of a room full of hairdressers being rude to each other for an hour and a half, because that is what it is, done with real skill. Do not see it for the mystery. It carries a 15, and at home the corridors feel less like padding and Perkins is exactly as loud.
