In one of the episodes of Treehouse of Horror IX of the animated series The Simpsons, the wig on Homer’s head began to live its own life and a hitherto unprecedented desire to kill was awakened in his hair. Amazingly, "Bad Hairstyle", aka "My Hair Wants to Kill" is an interpretation of the same plot, but with a serious mine. At the same time, Hair for some reason decided to play with the fashionable theme of African-American identity. What is it: meaningless social digging into the subject of narrow standards of beauty and the desire of black women to conform to them or free-spirited absurdist fantasy? Most likely, something in between: “My Hair” works best when the chaos of category B takes its toll, and the necessary atmosphere is present, although for the most part the script suffers from confusing reasoning and unclear theses.
Anna is a determined black girl producer. She lives in Los Angeles in the late 80s - the place and time of the heyday of pop culture. It is no wonder that the music channel where Anna works is called “Culture”. Among her charismatic colleagues, the girl is the embodiment of wabi-sabi, although with her flaw she fits into the company. As a child, due to an unsuccessful chemical perm, Anna has certain aesthetic problems with hair, bald spots, etc., which affected the choice of style. A deadlocked career (to allow a woman to be the host of the show, channel managers can not), leads Anna to a first-class specialist in hair extension. After a painful session, the heroine has shiny, black, straight hair, allowing Anna to get a dream job, only soon it turns out that their previous mistress was a witch, and hair requires a constant flow of blood.
With a horror premise, as well as a specific cultural background (suddenly Hair is based on traditional African beliefs as well), comparisons with Jordan Peele’s work are inevitable. Even the trailer for “Hair” resembles the atmosphere of “We”, not to mention the style of the picture itself: the film is deliberately shot in the grainy style of the 80s for implementation, and according to the concept it is a classic horror with a naive but combative main character. The context is also interesting: Hair is based on the point of view of a person who does not want to fit into the standards of beauty, but she has to do it to conform. The idea that women want to try new images over and over again or explore their own uniqueness is phantom (apparently, the producers of the tape found it too abstruse), and yet it occupies an important place in the script.
If you discard these gloomy messages, then Hair is not a very neat project. Despite the fact that there are many bloody moments here, the story hardly looks whole, and because of the bloated timekeeping, you have to sculpt a cut. It seems that the script would have been more successful in the format of a series of some antalogous horror series. The mythological details remain unanswered. How does enchanted hair work? Do they really control their owners? Anna's motives to succumb to the devil's hairstyle are clear, it is difficult to understand the psychologism of the heroine. Meanwhile, any suspense moments for some non-obvious reason are tempered by humor or character revelations more like distracting maneuvers. Comedy, by the way, is the strength of Hair, thanks to a plot that is more stupid than frightening.
It takes almost an hour before the hair picks up the first victim, although before that, hints are constantly made at the paranormal essence of the new hairstyle. No matter how fascinating social (and perhaps bloody) plot machinations are, there are still many questions left after watching “Hair”: such films must, after all, develop quickly so that fantastic elements in the context are not so striking. As a result, the material is presented too carefully, and not directly, as it probably should from the social side. The second variant of the development of "Hair" could be a mischievous grindhouse, but there is not enough spectacle: still the concept in the tape is too stupid to be taken seriously. In other words, both in terms of horror and moral weight, the creator seems that everything he said in his film project is extremely clear, although the director had nothing to say ... except the desire to say something with his film.
6 out of 10