'Opus' Review: John Malkovich Has a Fever, and the Only Prescription Is a Better Movie
03/14/2025 09:54 AM
If horror movies have taught us anything it's this: Don't go anywhere. Don't leave your house, and if you do leave your house, don't leave your hometown. And if you do leave your hometown, don't go out to the middle of nowhere. And if you do go out to the middle of nowhere and someone asks you all to surrender your cell phones, skip to the end and run away in terror right now. It'll save everybody — you and the killer cultists included — a lot of bother.
Writer/director Mark Anthony Green's "Opus" is the latest in a long line of films where city folk are invited to somewhere creepy, ignore obvious red flags for most of the runtime, then have the audacity to act surprised when scary things happen. Specifically this is the creepy cult version, where everyone they meet is a little eccentric and obsessive but nobody thinks it's a bad thing until the murders start. If you haven't seen "The Wicker Man" you've probably seen "Midsommar." If you haven't seen "Midsommar" you've probably seen "The Menu."
If you've seen any of those movies — or "Children of the Corn," or "The Sacrament," or even "Manos: The Hands of Fate" — you're way ahead of everyone in "Opus." To paraphrase Randy from the "Scream" movies, "If they watched 'A Return to Salem's Lot' it'd save time. There's a formula to it. A very simple formula!" A very, very, very, very simple formula.
"Opus" stars Ayo Edebiri as Ariel Ecton, a young, idealistic reporter who dreams of becoming a great writer. Her chance arrives when reclusive music superstar Alfred Moretti announces his first new album in decades, and invites Ariel, her boss Stan (Murray Bartlett), TV host Clara Armstrong (Juliette Lewis), a social media influencer (Stephanie Suganami), and a few other prominent figures to his weirdo compound in Utah.
Moretti is a notorious eccentric, so at first his guests simply marvel at his theatricality, and at his obsessive fans who hover in the periphery, and at Moretti's insistence that his guests partake in specific (and intimate) follicular detail work. Only Ariel seems to think any of this weird stuff is suspicious. To everyone else it's just show business. Artists are oddballs and that comes with the territory. What are obsessive fans if not cultists, or vice-versa? Wouldn't you own a weird compound in Utah where everyone worships you if you could?
It would be nice to report that "Opus" spends its runtime getting into the weeds of this particular, bizarre form of celebrity in which revered artists have carte blanche to indulge their every impulse, start buying their own hype, and lose their moral compass in the process. Moretti would hardly be the first hit performer to start acting like they're a god, or at least a vessel of divine inspiration. Malkovich acts his heart out and gets wacky, and few actors have ever made the unnatural seem more natural than John Malkovich. When he's on-screen we're always in good hands.
But besides Ariel, the rest of the characters are so pathetically obtuse that the film soon grows annoying. Not that we can't believe people who write about the entertainment industry are used to putting up with quirky behavior — you're reading a trade publication right now, so there's a good chance you've had a taste of that yourself — but at some point after people go missing and mysterious acts of violence are mysteriously acted on in front of their eyes, you have to wonder why Mark Anthony Green's film focuses so heavily on Ariel's perspective.
Why? Because the film's themes about artistic indulgence and the parasitic nature of entertainment writers — which is a fair cop (give us hell, Mr. Green!) — never lands because Ariel doesn't think any of this is normal, at all. Moretti's diabolical scheme is indistinguishable from a typical Tuesday for many of these people, but the audience doesn't have the frame of reference that allows us to seriously question whether Ariel is being paranoid. So Ariel and the audience are always in horror movie mode while everyone else is in fake Hollywood mode, and we swiftly grow impatient for the rest of the film to catch up to us, or to swerve and take us in a different direction.
"Opus" doesn't swerve, at least not until it's too late to make an impression. When the scary parts arrive it feels arbitrary, if not motivationally then at least structurally. By then it's anticlimactic, both short and obvious despite the fact that "Opus" thinks it's blowing our minds. All the elements are in place for something truly damning and critical, and aimed in a deserving direction. It's especially similar to Mark Mylod's "The Menu" except this film's nutritional value and flavor are conspicuously absent, neglecting to thoroughly explore its themes and indulge in its phobias. "Opus" is a Cheeto without the Cheeto dust, so of course we feel cheeted.
An A24 release, “Opus” is now playing exclusively in theaters.
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