“Medusa” in the cinema: women against Brazil

A young woman is walking home alone at night. She feels someone behind her, turns around in fear, starts to run. But she has no chance of escaping. The group of masked women pounces on them. They punch and kick her, call her a “slut” and a “sinner,” and film her vowing to live a virtuous life. The video collects 10,000 likes.

The film “Medusa” shows the Brazil of a near future. The country is plagued by droughts, and there is no electricity in the cities. People seek their salvation in radical Christian values, including the group of women who put on white theater masks at night and hunt down “unbelieving” women.

In her second film, Anita Rocha da Silveira draws a dystopian picture of her homeland. The work is clearly a child of the Bolsonaro era, but at the same time anything but leaden. Da Silveira drenches her urban landscapes in neon colors, under which Bernardo Uzeda’s soundtrack wafts straight out of John Carpenter’s old synthesizer.

Accomplices of the patriarchal system

Everything about “Medusa” is lustfully over the top. The marauding avengers make a pilgrimage to a church lit in blue and pink, sing religious pop songs with toothpaste grins and post online tutorials on how to take the perfect Christian selfie. And da Silveira meanders happily through the genres: a bit of horror, some youth drama, a dash of romance, all in the gesture of a grotesque.

At the center is Mariana (Mari Oliveira), one of the masked militia officers. She is obsessed with the legend of Melissa (Bruna Linzmeyer), the first victim of the fight against moral decay. She is said to be living in hiding, disfigured by an arson attack. Mariana wants to find her and take a picture of her face to prove the legend.

For this she is hired in a clinic for coma patients, which turns out to be a haven of joie de vivre in a beautiful reversal. The manager (Joana Medeiros) dances between the beds at night and sleeps with a male nurse (Gabriel Salabert). For her part, Mariana falls in love with a woken colleague (Felipe Frazão). This not only plunges her into a crisis of meaning, but also makes her a traitor in the eyes of her fellow campaigner Michele (Lara Tremouroux).

Anita Rocha da Silveira stages this with calmness and fresh image ideas. Again and again she inserts dreamlike sequences; when a power failure causes the lights to flicker on the coma station, she shows poetic long shots.

Cameraman João Atala also holds back when it comes to the violence of the women. Da Silveira’s “Medusa” is not about creating terror, but about telling a story of a world in which women become accomplices of a repressive patriarchal system. She ventures into the realms of B-movies. Some scenes are striking, but are immediately replaced by moments of radical clarity. Influencer Michele removes her makeup after filming a chaste makeup tutorial to reveal a black eye her godly boyfriend gave her.

As exaggerated as this brave new world of Christian fundamentalism may seem: da Silveira did not invent the role models for violent anti-feminists. She took them straight from the Brazilian news.

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