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The Limited Reach of a Soulless Opus

There’s a very curious theme that reveals itself at the end of Mark Anthony Green’s debut film Opus -a statement on the nature of infamy and how, especially in the internet age, it can spread with as much power and even adulation as traditional fame. Look at any of the “cancelled” celebrities whose profiles have exploded amongst new audiences merely out of the appeal of transgression from the seeming “status quo”. I’d gamble that a majority of J.K. Rowling’s followers these days never once picked up a copy of Harry Potter, but love that she’s fighting their culture war. Kanye West is also now attracting an audience simply for being controversial. The ending to Opus doesn’t offer an exact allegory given what its celebrity character does, but the impact it suggests fascinatingly taps into that.
And I only wish that the movie up to that point was just as fascinating, or engaged with this kind of theming from an earlier point. Instead it plays out a tamer, less intuitive version of Midsommar, where one lone young journalist gradually comes to realize she is in danger from a cult.
This cult leader happens to be a famous eccentric pop star from the 80s and 90s called Alfred Moretti, played by John Malkovich and styled a bit like Elton John or Prince. He was extremely influential and beloved before disappearing for more than two decades. The announcement of a new album after all that time is met with rapturous interest and a select few, including Ayo Edebiri’s music reporter Ariel, are invited to his isolated Utah compound for a listening party prior to its release -a compound staffed with devotees to both Moretti’s stardom itself and a strange New Age religion called Levelism.
From here the movie doesn’t really define itself very distinctly, as Ariel is of course the one person put off by the eccentric habits of this movement, which requires the confiscation of every electronic device, the unsanitary sharing of communal food, and even the enforced shaving of pubic hair. The guests are each assigned a concierge to shadow them at all times and the air of the place is very openly hostile, to the point it strains credulity how much of a blind eye Ariel’s companions -and especially her boss Stan (Murray Bartlett), who at one point is non-fatally shot with an arrow, maintain towards it all. Even in the context of Moretti’s various quirks, for which he gets a lot of leeway, it comes off as shallow writing designed to isolate Ariel in a contrived way.
Perhaps it is a general cynicism on the part of Green towards celebrity worship -in this case, literal celebrity worship. He certainly plays up the enigma of Moretti, though without really encapsulating his allure -a hard thing to do for sure in any movie, but one that Opus fails to make even a decent effort at. Moretti’s strangeness never comes off as anything but ego-driven, and to be fair, Malkovich plays that well -whether it’s in a bizarre spiritual experience lying on the floor of his grand dining hall or his meandering stories, or just his calmness in the face of any question that clearly masks some annoyance or dismay -such as when he pushes Ariel to elaborate on her (largely already positive) feelings about the nature of his sound. As to that music, it’s fairly disjointed -a moody elegiac single is followed by a piece much more experimental and chaotic -though for the latter song the music itself is subsumed by the performance art exhibition of it that he gives to the guests in an almost circus-like manner. It’s creative, and again hearkens to certain pop stylists of the 70s and 80s, but in its way it’s also not quite weird enough for what Green seems to intend the audience to take from it.
This Jonestown is not enough on its own merits, especially given how little goes into defining those cult members themselves. Peter Diseth’s Jorg gets a curious backstory as a music teacher, but other acolytes played by the likes Tatanka Means and Amber Midthunder are just drones with singular objectives. And unlike in Midsommar, Green can’t really set so disturbing an atmosphere -because the cult is such a monolith and Ariel herself is crucially not compromised by anything within this situation or outside of it. It plays through the motions then, and Edebiri in her rational comedic voice and sense of timing, handles it alright. She’s a good person to point to things and say they’re weird. But it’s not enough when it’s just making her a mouthpiece for an audience impatient to get to when things fly out of control. And even then there’s nothing sensational, beyond the gruesome fate of one character that is poorly explained. There doesn’t seem to be any goal towards the guests beyond the ego-stroking, so the Levelists don’t project any real purpose, betraying the shallowness of their conceptual design.
The film is relatively well shot, and some of its production choices are smart -in particular the dormitories with rounded white walls and few windows that really emphasize a feeling of claustrophobic isolation. There’s a disorienting character to the compound more broadly, which we see in a drone shot early but it keeps appearing to have new dimensions as it is explored in the narrative proper. Green has some competency with suspense -the movie only picks up in its last act when naturally Ariel is on the lamb trying to get out. But it is also nothing that quite resolves or nullifies the movie’s duller conventions up to that point.
As celebrity satire, Opus isn’t particularly biting. It’s cult of personality by way of a real cult commentary doesn’t manifest strongly enough to make any real cogent point, until arguably the very end -though still in a relatively shallow sense. Moretti’s treatment is without nuance, his issues entirely ego-based and thus very easy to depict outrageously. It’s much harder, though more interesting to cast him against a more complicated legacy as such real-life analogues typically are. The intended tragedy of the note the movie ultimately ends on feels undermined by this and not as damning as it could be given its weight and real-world parallels. If only it were just a guy like Moretti who had a rabid, proselytizing fan base. Green happened upon something worth exploring, but decided to only make it the punctuation to an uninspired one-hundred-minute preamble. Opus isn’t anybody’s opus.

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