This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Truc Nguyen’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
Medusa’s Revenge
(Medusa)
Medusa is a Portuguese film that tells the story of a group of very religious girls who are secretly a part of a vigilante gang. This vigilante gang is motivated through their strong beliefs that women are to be pure and feminine. This belief is due to their participation in an Evangelical Cult. Throughout this mindset, during the night, they search for and attack people they deem unworthy and urge them to go back to God. They go after prostitutes, cheaters, etc. During one of these group activities, Mariana is injured badly, leaving a huge scar on her face that alters her life entirely. She loses her job and battles against herself and her peers as her perspective on religion changes.
In this film, music plays a huge role. An instance of this is when the film begins with a scene of a girl getting beat up by the “girl gang”, and then later on, the violent girls are seen dancing and singing to pop songs. It creates a contrast from the conformity of being feminine due to their religious beliefs and the deep rage the “vigilante girls” actually feel from the constraints on them. Another usage of music I noticed was the choice of songs that were played in the scenes of the church-- they were all kind of haunting in a way. This could’ve been to cause a gut-feeling in the audience that the church was not so “clean and calm” as it seems at first.
The neon lights during the scenes with all the girls in the gang give off a message like “rebel”. This makes sense because the most common places we see neon lights are in clubs, and the neon lights against the darkness of the night represent the girls going against society as they take “justice” into their own hands (although, they deem what they’re doing as helping clean the world). This is due to the fact that clubs are often associated with alcohol, partying, and other things that definitely would go against the Evangelical cult. Even when “rebelling”, the girls try to justify their crimes by choosing people they deem “God” wouldn’t care about as victims
This film wasn’t all that interesting to me; I can’t specifically tell you why. To me, it seemed like the plot was all over the place in the beginning because it introduced so many characters at the same time. The characters should’ve been introduced more spread out to allow the viewers to build connections with them. Overall, I would not recommend this film.