Medusa Deluxe

I randomly booked into see this film, knowing basically nothing about it apart from the two word synopsis "murder, hairdressing". Sign me up! It's got to be one of the most entertaining cinema experiences I've had in the last year.

Set backstage in a run-down events centre outside Preston bus-station, every character feels alive (a little stage-y perhaps). It's pretty funny, although it makes you wait for the darkest-of-dark humour to develop. The film is presented as a Children of Men-style real-time single shot and the camera's always following someone down a rabbit hole - it feels like there's always a lot more plot going on than perhaps there actually is. The whodunnit is not the most compelling thing about the film - it really nails it's atmosphere, characters, costumes and hair (naturally!)

It's beautifully filmed, soundtrack is great too - see it on the biggest screen you can find.

An ingenious comedy that imitates one-take productions, it is rather built on the basis of well-structured, assembled and recorded sequences that, in the style of Alfred Hitchcock's «Rope», resolve the transitions by means of dissolves and cuts between black shots and other resources. Unlike Hitchcockian drama, however, the camera is not static, but a mobile 'stylo' that enters dressing rooms, bathrooms, elevators, and a stage, and moves through stairs, corridors and gates.

As in «Rope», the plot revolves around the murder of a person (a hairdresser), whose scalp was torn off after being killed, in the middle of a celebration. Instead of a group of guests in an apartment, with the corpse cleverly hidden, here it is a center for events and shows in London, where a hairdressing contest is happening. So the form is the content and viceversa, they are two faces of the same complex portrait and complementary reflections on the modern lives of those who are usually out of frame in mainstream cinema.

The central cast looks like a postcard from Benetton with vibrant, vivacious and energetic actors of various ethnicities, made up of the fearsome hairdressers Cleve (Clare Perkins), Kendra (Harriet Webb) and Divine (Kayla Meikle) who compete for the grand prize, the promoter René (Darrell D'Silva), the Colombian hairdresser Angel (Luke Pasqualino), the models Angie (Lilit Lesser), Inez (Kae Alexander), Timba (Anita-Joy Uwajeh), and Etsy (Debris Stevenson), the security guards Gac (Hieder Ali) and Patricio (Nicholas Karimi), and the baby Pablo (twins Logan and James Porter). They all wait for the Police to arrive to question them about the murder of the fearsome Mosca (John Alan Roberts), but since the police arrive after the storm as the rainbow, we follow plenty scenes and dialogues of confrontation, persecution, violence, confessions, music and dancing.

Thomas Hardiman wrote and directed his first feature film and the result was this great film that makes us spend 101 minutes of fun, synergy and extravagance, without missing touching moments, guided by the admirable photography of Robbie Ryan and his operator Jake Whitehouse.

No pun intended - especially because it is a guy who has been done. The movie does start with the announcement of a police investigation. A police investigation we won't see much of by the way. We will stay and stick with the hairdressers and everyone.

This is a whodunnit, but it also is a look behind the scenes. It is a sort of love letter to hairdressers. That being said, do not expect this to be pulling any ... punches. The very first characters we see talk ... let's call it freely. You may feel it is rough and there are some anger issues for sure ... but it is also fun to watch.

What is fun to watch to a degree is the one shot thing. I did not detect any easy swipe or any other camera movement that would make it easy to cut and edit. Good acting ... good little movie.

Set amongst the cut-throat world of a regional hairdressing contest, this rather thinly spread drama follows the antics of some would-be competitors who gather for their annual jamboree only to find that one of their number has been killed. Scalped, to be precise. As the story develops, we see that there are no shortage of suspects from the great and the good as the scene-stealing "Cleve" (Clare Perkins), "Divine" (Kayla Meikle) and "Kendra" (Harriet Webb) spat, squabble and spar like the best of them. They are all stuck waiting for the police to question them so tensions are only going to increase as they gossip, conspire and also demonstrate some considerably imaginative skills with their hairdos before: enter the partner of the victim. "Angel". At last some semblance of acting from the usually handsome but wooden Luke Pasqualino. Loads of stereotypes, yes, but he actually turns in quite an engaging performance as the camp-as-Christmas, distraught, mincer. Unfortunately, though, this is really just a one act play that has been overstretched into one hundred minutes of screen time, and though it most certainly has it's moments, there are too many extended tracking shots as the camera follows someone, somewhere, around their complex that seemed bigger than the Royal Albert Hall. There's simply too much padding around a story that could have done a little more to develop the personalities more. It is underpinned by some effective black humour - and some of that delivers well and caustically (especially from Perkins) but there's too much of a paucity of that to stop this from feeling rather longer than it is. It looks every a inch a television play, and as such does it's job fine - but I wouldn't say you need to buy a ticket to watch it.

The one-take movie is a fun concept. But the fact still remains that if the script isn't good, the concept isn't going to cover up that fact. This was actually the first one-take film I've seen that I haven't enjoyed. All the other ones have had a great script to back up the concept. On this occasion though I wonder if they were using it to mask the weakness of what they had to work with, rather than doing it for purely artistic reasons.

The first thing a film has to do is make you care, and this one never did. I never found a character I could relate to or even enjoy their presence on screen. And I was never given a reason to care about the murder-mystery. We never meet the person who is murdered or even see them murdered. We are just told and then expected to spend 90 minutes desperately wondering whodunnit. That's not possible to do.

A one-take whodunnit should have been an absolute dream film for me to enjoy, but if the execution isn't there then it doesn't matter. This one was sadly a big misfire for me. 3/10.