Opus

Toothless and fractured, Mark Anthony Green’s “Opus” premiered on Monday night at the Sundance Film Festival to a disappointed audience wondering what it thinks it’s trying to say. Ostensibly a commentary on celebrity culture and the fawning journalists around it, “Opus” is one of those movies that throws talking points at the wall without having an actual point of view on any of them. Arguably even worse than the shallow nature of this film is how aggressively unentertaining it ended up, lacking in humor and horror to equal degrees. Only a playful performance from the great John Malkovich saves it from being a truly historic disaster.

The legendary star plays a legendary pop artist named Alfred Moretti, who we’re informed through a sizzle reel provided by his quirky PR representative Soledad Yusef (Tony Hale) was once the biggest musician in the world. Nineteen hit albums are impressive enough, but Moretti is portrayed as a force not unlike Prince or David Bowie, someone who transcended pure fame to reach another level of stardom, almost closer to a cult leader than an artist.

And then he just disappeared, living in a compound in the middle of nowhere. When it’s announced that he’s going to release his first album in more than a generation, Caesar’s Request, the world erupts in anticipation. To fuel the fire, Moretti and his team invite a select group of journalists to his makeshift city, a massive estate populated with men and women in blue robes who cater to every one of Moretti’s wishes. (Again, cult vibe, in case you didn’t get it.) The select few include a major music publication editor named Stan Sullivan (Murray Bartlett) and one of his rookie employees, Ariel Ecton (Ayo Edebiri). He brings her along, insisting that he will write the piece and she’s mostly there for notes, but we know she’s the real journalist in the pair, in part because she doesn’t just swallow everything Moretti serves up for them. Other guests include characters played by Juliette Lewis, Melissa Chambers, Stephanie Suganami, and Mark Sivertsen, while Amber Midthunder and Tatanka Means are loyal servants of the Moretti way of life.

Anyone who has seen “The Menu,” “Blink Twice,” or any number of other recent dissections of power-hungry eccentrics knows where “Opus” is going, which means it has to be more about the journey than the destination, and this one is a tedious trek. While everyone else falls victim to Moretti’s charms, Ecton is the only one who sees the real story here: Not the return of a pop star but the fact that he’s turned into a cult leader in his absence. She wants to write that story, but Stan keeps insisting it stay about the music, a commentary on how pop culture journalists often focus on the wrong thing, but that feels like a pretty skinny skeleton on which to hang an entire film.

As if presuming his commentary on the parasitic nature of celebrity culture and the people who write about it would be fascinating on its own terms, Green hasn’t written nearly enough interesting scenes or populated his film with interesting enough characters. There are little beats about the wacky insanity of it all, such as the guests being shaved everywhere by a cult member before being allowed to attend the listening party, but they lead absolutely nowhere, and never accumulate in a way that builds tension. It’s weird for the sake of weird, and it’s honestly not even remotely weird enough. To really work, “Opus” needed to go places that Green seems unwilling to go, getting violent, scary, and strange in ways that this generally inert film is consistently afraid to approach.

It doesn’t help that Green wastes so much of his cast too. The engaging Lewis is such a non-factor that one has to presume a bigger part was cut while Chambers and Suganami feel like they never had a crucial role in any stage of the production. Malkovich is the only one who delivers, singing his own songs (written by Nile Rodgers & The-Dream) and slinking through his scenes as if he’s playing a python who just turned into a pop star. Even Edebiri can’t get around the script, ending up too much of a cog in this film’s plot, a way to push it from point A to point B instead of a character with any agency of her own.

Early in the film, Ariel bemoans her lowly position at her publication to a friend (Young Mazino), who tells her the truth: She has to no story to tell. She’s not rich or poor enough to be interesting. She has no way to separate herself from the crowd. The idea is clearly that the events that follow give Ariel the POV she always needed, but it ends up a self-commentary on the film, one that mistakes opening your mouth for actually having something to say.

This review was filed from the Sundance Film Festival. It opens on March 14, 2025.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

Opus

Horror
star rating star rating
104 minutes R 2025

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