Producers: Collin Creighton, Brad Weston, Poppy Hanks, Jelani Johnson, Mark Anthony Green and Josh Bachove Director: Mark Anthony Green Screenplay: Mark Anthony Green Cast: Ayo Edebiri, John Malkovich, Juliette Lewis, Murray Bartlett, Amber Midthunder, Melissa Chambers, Stephanie Suganami, Mark Sivertsen, Tony Hale, Tatanka Means, Aspen Martinez, Peter Diseth and Tamera Tomakili Distributor: A24
Grade: C-
One can always count on John Malkovich to bring a touch of sinister eccentricity to any role, but in Mark Anthony Green’s “Opus” he’s allowed to go full throttle in that department. No wonder his character, Alfred Moretti, rattles Ariel Ecton (Ayo Edebiri), the young staffer at a music magazine, when the reclusive pop icon unexpectedly invites her to a momentous event at his remote compound in the Utah desert.
Moretti, you see, is a nineties pop idol who mysteriously stopped performing and disappeared from public view nearly thirty years ago. Now he’s excited not only his fan base but the whole world by announcing his first new recordings in three decades. And he’s chosen six people to come hear his creations before anyone else at what amounts to a fabulous launch party.
The other five are important people: talk show star Clara Armstrong (Juliette Lewis), prominent influencer Emily Katz (Stephanie Suganami), infamous paparazzo Bianca Tyson (Melissa Chambers), podcaster Bill Lotto (Mark Sivertsen) and Ariel’s editor Stan Sullivan (Murray Bartlett). She, on the other hand, is a nobody, Stan’s barely-published lackey.
She’s also the only one of the six who appears nonplussed by the strangeness of the isolated commune where the bus deposits the group after an hours-long drive. They’re required by Jorg (Peter Diseth), the guy she describes in her handwritten notes as a “creepy greeter,” to surrender their phones for the duration, and the other residents are no less peculiar, from aggressively solicitous Rachel (Tamera Tomakili) to Native American Najee (Tatanka Means). Even the little girl Maude (Aspen Martinez) who latches onto Ariel is a bit off.
In fact, the place is obviously a cult of Alfred, who has surrounded himself with committed acolytes wearing common garb and plastered-on smiles. Some are also chosen to serve as personal concierges to the guests, with Belle (Amber Midthunder), Ariel’s, sticking so closely to her, even accompanying her step-for-step on her morning jog, that Ariel is understandably unnerved.
Moretti, on the other hand, dons a variety of outrageous, colorful outfits—including a spaceman suit in which he presents one of his new songs—and shows a special interest in Ariel, even taking her to the shed where the members perform what he describes as their sole ritual—shucking oyster after oyster until they find one with a pearl, the discovery of which gives them high status among their fellows.
The set-up is not an unfamiliar one, with an unsuspecting soul lured to a weird place for some purpose that’s only gradually revealed. One of the most notable examples of the trope is “The Wicker Man,” but in more recent years Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” gave it a new lease on life, and since that success, it’s served in numerous pictures like “Midsommar” and “Blink Twice.”
The effectiveness of the conceit is determined in each case by how intriguing an ambience a film creates, and how surprising the revelations about the villain’s ultimate aims. In those respects “Opus” isn’t very high on the list. Despite Malkovich’s flamboyance, Moretti convinces more readily as an evil cult leader than as a pop music phenomenon (it doesn’t help that the songs we hear from his new album, written by Nile Rodgers and The-Dream, aren’t particularly compelling), and the rather rushed, mostly half-baked explanations for his treatment of his invitees—which extend, via a coda, two years into the future, when Ariel has become a best-selling author—seem either banal (simple revenge) or absurd (increased adulation and influence).
Of the others, Edebiri comes across as genuinely concerned, though her unremittingly sour expression gets tiresome. The rest are mostly over-the-top, with Lewis especially unrestrained and Midthunder notable for the rare case of underplaying. Technical credits, from Robert Pyzocha’s production design to Tommy Maddox-Upshaw’s cinematography, are generally adequate, but only Shirley Kurata’s costumes—those for Malkovich, that is—stand out. The background score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans is suitably unsettling, but Ernie Gilbert’s editing struggles with Green’s pacing, which is pretty sluggish until it abruptly goes into chaotic mode for the finale before going lethargic again in the coda.
Green obviously had ambitious goals here, melding a satire of celebrity culture with a thriller about cults, but in spite of Malkovich and Edebiri, “Opus” doesn’t work particularly well as either.