The Medusa Touch (1978)

French Detective-Inspector Brunel (Lino Ventura) has been lent to the London police from his native France for quite some time now. His stint in the UK does slowly near its end. To make things difficult, fate does put a rather strange and dangerous case in his way: John Morlar (Richard Burton), a misanthropic writer of very angry novels has been nearly beaten to death in his own apartment, and is now in a coma. The doctor responsible for his treatment (Gordon Jackson) thinks it is only a question of time until he dies, and if not for some very curious spikes in brain activity, he’d probably not even warrant the battery of equipment that lets him breathe right now.

Brunel’s investigation paints a curious picture of the victim: bitter, cynical, perpetually angry, and obsessed with catastrophes and large accidents, the man had few friends (if any), his psychiatrist Dr. Zonfeld (Lee Remick) probably being the closest person in his life still alive. Yet she seems rather cagy about something concerning her patient. Still, Brunel’s slow and systematic efforts begin to suggest that Morlar suffered from a curious delusion, the conviction that he had some sort of psychic power that killed anyone who made him angry. Given how many of the people who did that actually died in strange accidents, there might even be something to the man’s idea.

Late in life, Morlar even seems to have developed some control over his powers, which, combined with his clear conviction of his own superiority over basically everyone surrounding him, and his seething hatred for the powers that be, would have made for a good motive for killing the man. Particularly since Morlar started to make plans for the future…

Jack Gold’s The Medusa Touch seems to be a bit of a marmite film, with people apparently hating the film with quite some passion, or treating it like one of the great undervalued British horror films in the Nigel Kneale vein. I belong to the latter group, surprising nobody.

But then, it’s not difficult to understand why someone might not enjoy a slow-moving investigative movie that mostly consists of Lino Ventura talking to people until we flash back into a past that shows us some of the horrors the world inflicted on Morlar, and then the horrors he inflicted on it in turn. The film’s portrayal of its comatose antagonist here is fascinating, because it seems like an honest attempt to understand the mindset of the man, find compassion for him, yet also clearly portray his later reactions to the general crappiness of the world as just as horrifying as the world itself. It’s very much a film about a guy turned monstrous by his surroundings, but he’s now a monster nonetheless. Even more interesting, as played by Burton, he’s never likeable, because he is much too convinced of his own importance and superiority over everything human. It’s not a pleasant or convenient route to take for the film - making him an innocent betrayed or a simple fanatic would make this much easier to digest - but it certainly adds an additional quality of disquiet. We all have felt like Morlar, after all, and with his power, might we have turned out like he did? It’s not even as if he weren’t right about at least fifty percent of the things he is so angry about.

Politically, you might read this as a film about the violence that can be evoked by politics birthed of anger, of how the horrors of the world can bend and twist people so much they become just as cruel as what surrounds them. This, needless to say, can go either way, politically, and without psychic powers, you can easily imagine Morlar ending up as a Nazi or an RAF terrorist.

Apart from subtextual complexities, I also simply find The Medusa Touch often highly effective as a piece of SF horror. There’s a quality of brooding and slowly increasing dread to the affair, created with the help of subtly disquieting and disorienting editing, and Michael J. Lewis’s fantastic score, a mood that is only increased by the fact that we are led through the tale by a man so clearly down to Earth as Ventura’s Brunel. He feels so real, witnessing him step into the world of the uncanny feels wrong in all the right ways for the film.

Burton, never one of my favourite actors, is pretty much perfect for the role: projecting an inflated ego was never difficult for the guy, but here, he adds an undertow of genuine hurt hidden under all the anger and bitterness and self-obsession. As it turns out, Burton also has one of the most convincing death stares I’ve ever seen in an actor.

All that and a climax that includes Not-Westminster Cathedral falling down like London Bridge makes for a pretty irresistible movie in my book.