Today, Brazil. Mariana, 21 years old, belongs to a world where she must do her utmost to keep up the appearance of a perfect woman. In order to resist temptation, she and her girlfriends try their best to control everything and everyone around them. And that includes the town sinners. At night, the girl squad put on masks, hunt and beat up all women who have deviated from the right path. However, the day will come when the urge to scream will be stronger than it ever has been... (Full plot summary below)
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Today, Brazil. Mariana, 21 years old, belongs to a world where she must do her utmost to keep up the appearance of a perfect woman. In order to resist temptation, she and her girlfriends try their best to control everything and everyone around them. And that includes the town sinners. At night, the girl squad put on masks, hunt and beat up all women who have deviated from the right path. However, the day will come when the urge to scream will be stronger than it ever has been.
Leave your thoughts about Medusa.
| Film ThreatMichael Talbot-HaynesMedusa is an electrifying work of art that elevates its already elevated pop influences, a transcendental tableau of the true-life horror of female oppression. |
| RogerEbert.comMarya E. GatesEliciting powerful performances from her two leads and striking visuals from cinematographer João Atala, “Medusa” casts its gaze at the hypocritical and violent world of purity culture with unflinching honesty that will leave the audience spellbound long after the credits roll. |
| The Irish TimesTara BradyThe oppressively neon musical numbers and ominous pastoral pronouncements that “secular government was a mistake” are more convincing than the film’s late swerve into Giallo terrain. But the writer-director’s ideas about women as religious enforcers, complicit in their own subjugation, are fascinating. |
| The Observer (UK)Mark KermodeFor all its multitudinous reference points, this remains very much Da Silveira’s movie – as distinct and pointed as Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night or Julia Ducournau’s Raw – a genre film with something to say, and a unique voice with which to say it. |
| IndieWireKatie RifeDa Silviera’s vision of bubblegum fascism is compelling, and Medusa sucks viewers in right away. Unfortunately, however, the film expends far more effort on aesthetics and world-building than it does on narrative. |
| The Film StageJared MobarakThere’s plenty to like here: gorgeous cinematography—there’s an unforgettable shot during a power outage at the coma facility, where the generator attempts to flicker the small, rectangular lights along the walls of the main, symmetrical room—propulsive synth beats to go with the choir, and stellar performances that at some point all skew towards parody to really drive home the indoctrination angle before each awakening opens eyes to the truth. |
| Paste MagazineNatalia KeoganThe 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. |
| TheWrapElizabeth WeitzmanThough the religious component is written broadly, the impact is hardly more surreal than many elements of 21st-century reality. |
| Screen DailyDemetrios MatheouDa Silveira sets a tone that nimbly flows between comedy, mystery and discomforting satire (the Pastor generally makes the skin crawl), though her occasional wink towards horror offers fun rather than frights, to the film’s detriment. |
| The GuardianPeter BradshawThis really is a very strange film, and perhaps doesn’t quite cohere the way a more rigorously refined and redrafted screenplay might, but each of its exotic elements suggests a mounting delirium – exactly the kind of unacknowledged, displaced group frustration that grows and metastasises in a police state. |
