In “Medusa,” a chilling story about women’s liberation set to pop music, a group of church-going girls in Brazil play Christian Stepford Wives day and night, walk the streets wearing white masks , terrorizing women whom they see as wanderers in repentance.
Writer and director Anita Rocha da Silveira takes a visual approach that feels playful, deploying the same blood-splattered fluorescent backgrounds and techno-influenced bodily grotesqueness of recent feminist horror films like “Titanium.”
Yet these extremes also seem appropriate given the South American nation’s increasingly zealous movement against LGBTQ people and sex-positive culture. The American public might find this familiar, although in Brazil, where the rate of homophobic hate crimes is one of the highest in the world, it are in fact evangelical gangs seeking to violently cleanse their communities.
Rocha da Silveira dwells on the chilling nature of indoctrination as it unfolds in modern times: Mari (Mari Oliveira) and her girlfriends perform catchy worship songs for their congregation, and queen bee Michele (Lara Tremouroux) creates YouTube beauty tutorials that demonstrate how to take Christian selfies.
Mari experiences a revival after one of the gang’s Midnight Crusades leaves a scar on her face. Fired from her cosmetic surgery job and certain of her eternal celibacy, she begins working at a clinic for people in comas, hoping she can help herself by snapping a picture of the mythical Melissa, a sinful celebrity whose face has been set on fire. by a religious warrior.
Eventually, with the help of an attractive co-worker, Mari begins to realize the pettiness of her ways.
While dressed in shock value clothing, “Medusa” is also a straightforward character study, tackling issues such as the blight of Western beauty standards and the difficulties of leaving an abusive relationship along the way. More importantly, Mari’s evolution feels real, her triumphs genuinely moving. It’s here that “Medusa” presents a clever idea: the righteous mob is terrifying, but equally unnerving leaves it.
Astonished
Unclassified. Duration: 1h27. In theaters.