In the beginning, the tale was cold. She is born like this, one of three winged succubi with venomous snakes for hair whose gaze can turn those who share it to stone. Her wrath, it seems, is not created, but inherited. Then, Ovid tried his hand, and it goes like this: she is beautiful — so beautiful that Poseidon takes her for throws of passion in Athena’s temple. She endures punishment out of envy, with her long locks turned into stone. Poseidon gets away unscathed.
In 2021, Youssef Chebbi and ismaël reconstruct the archaic myth once again with the modern twist in the form of a psychological thriller, set against the backdrop of a black and white Tunis. Told over the course of nine nights, Black Medusa is a novel iteration of the classic rape revenge tale whose complexities outperform its predecessors within the genre. Each night, Nada (Nour Hajri) carries out her modus operandi of frequenting different bars or clubs so as to lend herself as a confidante for any man eager to tell his story. This ritual inevitably ends in a macabre fashion, climaxing in some shape of torture and eventual murder.
What sets Black Medusa apart from something as similar and as current as Promising Young Woman is that this never feels like a personalized narration; instead, Nada’s actions take part in the treatment of a cycle of abuse propagated in Tunisia, as the antecedents to her vengeful actions are never depicted on screen. The film takes a systemic view of sexual abuse, which is only underscored by the fact that Nada never speaks, and it is revealed that she is mute by choice; to communicate with her victims or Noura — the young woman she meets through her job as a video editor — Nada uses the text to speech ability of her phone, stripping her of an actual voice. Her silence is a product of her own volition, sidestepping the narrative of victims who remain quiet by some outside force.
What is most singular about this film, if we consider it through the lens of a rape revenge, is that it doesn’t seem like it’s trying to be radically feminist, or even feminist at all. The narrative scope that is void of any personal attachment with Nada removes the culpability one might feel for sympathizing for her male victims. In nearly all of the cases, Nada drugs her victims, and in some of those cases, she consummates the evening by sodomizing them with physical objects, like a broom, for instance. In this breath, the film loses its feminist edge simply because I believe that using rape as a revenge for rape is very deleterious to survivors themselves and the original brutality is not rectified.
As the nights progress, however, Nada’s actions take on various permutations, and her methods are never reproduced to an exact degree. Matters become more difficult as well with the development of her relationship with Noura, when Noura becomes more and more conscious of how Nada spends her nights. Therefore, the detachedness of the story attenuates over the course of the film, and it’s in this arc between the two women that Nada is given a sense of individuality.
On a technical level, it is so clear how passionate these directors are about filmmaking. Both ismaël and Chebbi take advantage of saccadic shots, extended takes, and intense alternating shots of different scenes to bring the notion of disarray and panic into fruition. In tandem with the audiovisual aspects of the film, the complexities of the story will inevitably leave the audience questioning the different elements at play. Ultimately, the story is audacious in that it is a societal criticism that doesn’t seek to pigeonhole. The judgment falls into your hands.
