Opus is writer/director Mark Anthony Green’s feature directorial debut, having premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. I was excited for this, despite the mixed-to-negative reception the film received out of that festival. This is the first time we have star Ayo Edebiri in a leading theatrical role, and I enjoy her very much in projects like The Bear and Bottoms. The setup for this movie sounded fun, and very much of a piece with recent ‘elevated horror’ projects like The Menu and Midsommar. But while Opus spends the majority of its runtime desperately in search of its point, everything potentially impactful about its story is regrettably lost along the way. 

Idealistic 20-something journalist Ariel Ecton (Edebiri) works for a trendy music magazine and dreams of writing the thing that will make her an important figure in journalism. To her surprise, she’s invited to cover an event where reclusive ‘90s pop star Alfred Moretti (John Malkovich) is hosting an exclusive listening party for his first album in more than 20 years. This once-in-a-lifetime event at his remote Utah compound turns sour quickly as it quickly becomes clear to Ariel (and no one else, apparently) that some freaky cult shit is going on here.

Presumably, Opus wants to say a lot about the toxicity of celebrity culture and the absurdity of fandom that becomes celebrity worship, but it also feels so slapdash and muddled and poorly put together that it’s never clear what the point of all this is supposed to be. The poster has the tagline ‘no cult like celebrity’, and it feels like that is literally all that’s here. It feels like it’s borrowing (or shamelessly lifting) from a series of recent horror films – Midsommar, The Menu, Don’t Worry Darling, Blink Twice, to name a few, but is never doing anything that makes it feel like an original statement of its own. And I usually like this kind of movie, but when a not-great movie is constantly reminding you of better movies that you’d rather be watching instead (with the exception of the atrocious Don’t Worry Darling), we have a problem.

Ayo Edebiri is a star, and she manages to come out of this mostly unscathed. However, she isn’t really given a whole lot to do. She’s our lead, but she mainly just reacts to things and takes notes, and then in the third act she’s running away from things. I’d like to see her get a proper go at the scream queen persona, because this does not feel like an adequate use of her abilities. John Malkovich is clearly having a lot of fun playing this vapid, maniacal David Bowie-esque pop star, but we’ve seen him play this kind of character before and this time, the writing is aggressively not on his side. In our supporting cast, we have Murray Bartlett as Ariel’s boss who goes on this journey with her. We have Juliette Lewis playing a TV personality picked to go to the compound. We have Tony Hale popping up as Moretti’s assistant, and we have Amber Midthunder, also seen earlier this week in Novocaine, as Ariel’s appointed ‘concierge’, and she, too, is not given much to do.

I could talk about the style here, but really a lot of this feels like it’s stolen from other movies. A lot of the production design feels like a blatant ripoff of what Ari Aster did with Midsommar. The way the guest rooms are designed is eerily similar to Zoe Kravitz’s Blink Twice. Mark Anthony Green has certainly found inspiration in these movies, as well as a hundred streaming documentaries about cults, but he doesn’t seem interested in telling a story of his own. I’m not sure if A24 bought Opus out of the Sundance Film Festival this year or if it was already acquired, and just premiered there to create buzz. But it feels like A24 is doing self parody at this point, and this is why people who hate these movies hate these movies. Also if someone in the comments could describe to me why the film’s aspect ratio changes from 2:39:1 to 1:85:1 in the final few minutes of the film, it would be appreciated. Because if there was some bigger point to that, I didn’t get it.

Overall, it brings me no joy to report that Opus is a big swing and a miss for this viewer. There’s a bunch of elements that could work on their own but never really come together to form a piece of filmmaking with anything substantive to say. There’s horror elements, stuff about cults, very lazy and vague social commentary about celebrity culture and media consumption that feels like it’s desperately trying to find its point but never quite getting there. Ayo Edebiri is mostly wasted here. John Malkovich is clearly having fun but he might be the only one. Opus is unfortunately a convoluted and confounding mess in frantic search of something – anything – to say, and fails to make a strong impression.