In modern day France, the Gorgon Medusa still lives, her body intact, her head still attached to her shoulders. During a psychic battle with her two sisters, the Medusa handicaps her sisters but has her memory stolen. After wandering around in this state for some time, she enters the Grand-Guignol Theater where the sisters live to confront them a second time.
Rollin's last film is self-conscious and self-reflexive: Rollin mentions two earlier films and this one itself within the script. This goes further than an "in-joke". By setting a large part of the film inside the Grand-Guignol theater whose stage displays old photos and theater posters, Rollin is consciously placing his work within the context of French Gothic Horror. He points to his Phantasmagoric roots and stakes a claim as their modern auteur successor.
Interestingly in this regard, the film itself is perhaps Rollin's most literary & stage-bound: Rollin presents a lot of talk, a number of lengthy monologues describing interior states, and static shots of mostly static players (even alive, the characters have already turned to stone as it were). This approach is not active, not melodramatic, rather it's almost anti-Guignol, anti-horror film, and more conceptual and abstract, with all the events happening off stage, in the ether, or between shots. It's an unconventional approach. This doesn't make for a bad horror film, only a more cerebral one.
Instead of action scenes, what we are treated to is a series of inventions deep out of Rollin's imagination: statues that cry and bleed for eternity, a severed head that is still alive & sends out its power spiritually, a collection of small wooden abstract sculptures where the spirits of enemies seek each other out and never meet forever, people who slowly turn to stone and have time to still talk before they eventually die and turn solid, and a view of the Medusa as an "artist" who turns people into statues followed around by an art aficionado who can "enter" into paintings and who collects the statues Medusa creates.
Some of this is shown, but a lot of it needs to be described to be understood. So, we get a lot of descriptions of situations: the art collector explaining his world-view, the Medusa explaining how even without a memory she can't be defeated as long as she is self-aware of her own existence, Stheno, the "youngest" one of the Gorgon sisters, telling a young human woman the film's plot, its aftermath, and her current situation.
As with the main character in Rollin's earlier film, Living Dead Girl, the Medusa is horrified by her condition as a killer. She is also repulsed by the darkness within her sisters. She has a conscience that makes her punish them, to run away from the art collector who shows her the results of her "work", and to ask for death once she regains her memories and sees her victims before her and feels them screaming within her. She is a guilty killer. Not that her guilt alleviates the situation, since, as Stheno says, killing is what Gorgons do.
Even so, this film is less about the Medusa as a killing monster (compare it in this regard against The Gorgon or Clash of the Titans) as it is about a revulsion over states or conditions of entombment (an appropriate subject for the last film made before one dies). Souls of people are entombed in the statues or severed heads, Stheno can't leave the cemetery (and therefore can't live with the love of the woman she meets), and she has her half-live, half-dead friend Thomas entombed in a coffin there as well. At one point, Medusa says there is no time, that is a human construct, and she says there is no death. What that leaves is immobility for eternity, a concept, but perhaps one more horrific than death itself.
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