OPUS (2025)
Starring Ayo Edebiri, John Malkovich, Juliette Lewis, Murray Bartlett, Amber Midthunder, Stephanie Suganami, Young Mazino, Tatanka Means, Tony Hale, Mark Sivertsen, Aspen Martinez, Peter Diseth, Tamera Tomakili, Rose Marley Meizlesh, Jasper Keen, Young Mazino, Jean Efferon, Justin Perry, Aimee McGuire, Chris Highlands and the voice of Rosario Dawson.
Screenplay by Mark Anthony Green.
Directed by Mark Anthony Green.
Distributed by A24. 104 minutes. Rated R.
I have many – MANY – issues with the new A24 arty horror film Opus, about a reclusive rock music genius who is trying to return to the public eye after 30 years off of the charts (and off the grid) with his comeback album roll-out. However, as someone that has written about music for decades now, my biggest problem with the film is one of the simplest. If you are going to make a movie about a reclusive musical icon – one of the most important artistic minds of the 1990s, who regularly filled concert halls and stadiums – honestly you should have much better music.
I mean, hats off to John Malkovich for actually singing the songs which are used in Opus. And they were written, performed and produced by the talented artists The-Dream and Nile Rodgers. Some of them are kind of catchy, however, I could barely picture these songs getting played in an EDM festival, much less turning their singer into a cultural icon on the level of Bowie, Prince and Elton.
If we don’t buy the fact that Alfred Moretti (Malkovich) was one of the biggest artists of the decade – and that his songs were regularly topping the charts alongside the likes of Nirvana, Britney Spears, REM, Whitney Houston, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam and Mariah Carey – then Opus is going to have a tough sell to get us to buy into the rest of its highly stylized concept. (Also, although he is never less than entertaining to watch in the role, Malkovich is probably a good 10-20 years too old for the part, too.)
After 30 years out of the public eye, Moretti is getting ready to release a new album – one which is supposedly going to be his greatest artistic achievement. However, the eccentric artist has pretty much become a recluse. Therefore he has invited a handful of press members to his isolated New Mexico desert compound for a listening party for the new album.
Note to characters in bad horror films: you really never want to go to anything which takes place at a secluded compound.
The problem is that with the exception of one of the guests, a young journalist named Ariel Ecton (Ayo Edebiri from The Bear), all of the members of the media are vapid, self-absorbed, one-dimensional and dumb. Yes, I get the fact that that was sort of supposed to be the point the film is trying (heavy-handedly) to make, but is it that hard to come up with complex, interesting characters to try to kill off?
Each of the media members has their phone confiscated and is assigned a private concierge who watches their every move. Amber Midthunder (who has two movies opening this weekend with this and Novocaine), is particularly chilling in a pretty dialogue-free role of a determined concierge.
And what’s the deal with the strangely cultish seeming group of locals who also live on the compound?
It’s no surprise that the press types start to disappear and meet with strange “accidents,” although most of them are too self-absorbed to notice what is happening. Only Ariel realizes that things are going very wrong.
By the time we learn Moretti’s cult-of-personality larger plan for not only changing the music world but also for changing the world in general – let’s just say that he buys strongly into the Trump axiom, I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, and no one would care – we don’t care either.
This is not because we think these people deserve to die – although they are such cartoons that we do not really mourn their loss all that much either. However, the heavy-handedness and ridiculousness of the story just make it impossible to take seriously.
This type of story with people being mysteriously killed in a secluded area is hard to mess up. That goes back to the granddaddy of the form, Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, and more recently with the terrific The Menu and Glass Onion.
However, with its muddled tone, its awkward balance of satire and horror and the sort of silly final reveal, Opus really doesn’t work on any level.
Jay S. Jacobs
Copyright ©2025 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: March 14, 2025.
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