Anyone who has written about a much-loved music star with even the vaguest hint of light criticism will be aware of the horrors that can often follow. The tribal intensity of extremely online and extremely sensitive fandoms can lead to either a mild torrent of more tolerable abuse or something far darker, like death threats and sometimes doxing, an unending rage erupting from people who use emojis as avatars. There’s a great thriller to be made about this unpleasant tension, the fans who will do anything for their idol and the idol who will do nothing to stop them, but Opus, a poppy new A24 misfire premiering at Sundance, is not that movie.
It’s the first film from the writer-director Mark Anthony Green, who, like many before him, is so fixated on what he wants to say that he hasn’t been able to figure out how to say it. There’s maybe a slicker, simpler and more satisfying murder mystery to be told here – an assortment of media types picked off one-by-one at the remote ranch of a reclusive pop star – but he’s challenged himself with something far harder and ultimately too far out of his reach.
The pop star is Alfred Moretti (deliciously played by John Malkovich), who retreated from the public eye decades ago and has now returned with what he claims will be the greatest album ever made. In Willy Wonka style, he has invited a select few to his desert compound for an extravagant listening party – an influencer (Stephanie Suganami), a paparazzo (Melissa Chambers), a rock star turned podcaster (Mark Sivertsen), a TV show host (Juliette Lewis), a magazine editor (Murray Bartlett) and, in a surprise twist, his inexperienced junior writer Ariel (Ayo Edebiri). She’s felt a little hemmed in, pitching interviews that then are given to someone else, and is prepared to make the most of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Moretti has surrounded himself with a cult-like community of robe-wearing yes men who believe in teachings that prioritise creativity above all else, turning their idol into more of a god. Like many final girls before her, Ariel is convinced something more sinister is at play.
Green, a former GQ editor, has created a thriller that’s a little too on-trend to ever truly distinguish himself. It’s The Menu meets Blink Twice meets Glass Onion meets Midsommar meets Nine Perfect Strangers meets A Murder at the End of the World – a film that’s so familiar that even if it had been well-crafted, it would still feel reheated. There’s a pull to the opening scenes though, as Ariel tries to propel herself at work while being reminded by a friend that given her lack of substantive life experience and relatively easy background, her failure to be at a more progressed professional place is down to her being “middle as fuck”. Green also intersperses snippets of real pop culture (cameos from Wolf Blitzer, Bill Burr and Lenny Kravitz), yet they’re lost in a world that quickly feels fake and unmoored, his overly lit, overly quirky visual aesthetic and logic-free escalation taking us out of what could and should have been an involving thriller.
The music, created by Nile Rodgers and The-Dream, is unusually impressive, perhaps not quite enough to demand such a fervent following but certainly convincing enough. A magnetic Malkovich fully commits to the bit too, purring and prancing around while his descent into menace is believably modulated. But Edebiri, who can be an incredibly charming comedic presence, is left completely adrift. Her shuffling, in-the-notes performance works initially as an eager yet unsure junior writer but as the film starts to shift into darker genre territory, that same low-energy persona feels distractingly out of place. One never really feels the grand life-or-death stakes from her, mild nervous irritation when full-body fear is needed. It’s most glaring in a final, feeble confrontation with Malkovich where one can sense an unintentional added tension between someone who knows how to handle the material and someone who clearly doesn’t, the two acting as if in wildly different movies.
Not that a better actor could have done that much more with such a gentle whisper of a character facing a genuinely what-the-hell finale of absurd, long-winded explanation-giving that still leaves us scratching our heads. The reveals make little to no sense – carnage that’s too sudden and scrappy for something so ritualistic, a plan that requires too many variables to be seen as viable, an allegedly “of the moment” motivation that’s contradicted by the actual moment – and Green seems more focused on “wouldn’t it be sick if …” shocks rather than a plot that holds together. So much of what transpires is maddeningly pretentious yet hopelessly half-sketched as well as being shoddily stitched together as if some major, up-all-night surgery was then required in the editing suite. For a film so high on its own devilish intellect, it’s all incredibly stupid.
It’s frustrating to see yet another first-time film-maker overstack their plate in such a way that feels less like the product of impressive ambition and more empty bravado. Like the many films and shows it’s shamelessly, monotonously following, there’s a snappy sellable pitch but again, there’s just no thought-out follow-through and, given how bad this particular example is and is being received, one hopes we’re nearing the end of this torturous cycle.
Opus is screening at the Sundance film festival and will be in US cinemas on 14 March
