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The vigilante group traces its origins to the myth of a woman named Melissa, who was the most promiscuous girl ever to live in their town—more sinful than Lot’s daughters. Although she was beautiful, she was a homewrecker. One day a woman dressed like an angel wearing a white mask lit her face on fire and it is from this cleansing fire the young women find their mission. The Christian church has a long history of using fire to purify the bodies of the living to prepare their souls for the hereafter. Here da Silveira finds the horrific echoes of colonialism, from its forced conversion of indigenous peoples to its burning of their land, painfully reverberating ever still.
When one of these purifying attacks goes awry, leaving Mari visibly scarred, she loses her plastic surgery job and decides to search for Melissa, whom she believes is still alive in a coma ward. While on this search she meets a new set of people, whose point of view and way of living cause her to reevaluate everything she’s held to be true. This of course causes a rift with Michele. It’s in the way da Silveira handles this rift that we see the strength of her empathy. If women have been conditioned by the patriarchy to control each other, it’s only women who can also save each other.
As the two begin to find freedom within themselves and the strength to push back against the abusive men who run the church, other women in the vocal group step into the power they have relinquished. After observing Melissa defy her boyfriends, one such woman whispers to Mair: “Michele, Mariana, Melissa … I once read that girls’ names that start with the letter ‘M’ are names of malicious women … Mary Magdalene … Messalina … Monsters.”
Da Silveira’s film seeks to dismantle this very concept of the monstrous woman, and especially how women themselves uphold it. In Greek mythology, when Medusa broke her vow of celibacy, the goddess Athena turned her hair to snakes and made her beautiful face so hideous that all those who gazed on it turned to stone. Medusa isn’t a villain, she’s a victim. She dared embrace her sexual freedom and was condemned for it.
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