Opus review – off-key pop indus­try satire miss­es all its cues

A film’s great­ness is some­times not con­firmed at the moment of its incep­tion and ini­tial release. Some­times, we need to take a step back and see just how far a work has pen­e­trat­ed the col­lec­tive con­scious­ness, often by count­ing how many oth­er peo­ple have attempt­ed to make a film in its image. Judg­ing by the sheer vol­ume of films and TV works that offer a riff on Jor­dan Peele’s Get Out, we can now defin­i­tive­ly say that it is a great movie. But also, we should absolute­ly not blame it for the qual­i­ty of its legacy.

To wit: Mark Antho­ny Green’s Opus adopts the Get Out tem­plate, almost part and par­cel, to tell of malaise in the music indus­try via the return of obscene­ly famous elec­tro pop titan Alfred Mortet­ti played by (checks notes) John Malkovich. Fol­low­ing his world-dom­i­nat­ing ear­ly suc­cess and run of 17 hit albums, Moret­ti shunned the lime­light and retreat­ed to a remote desert ranch and did… who knows what?

The week­ly fea­tures meet­ing at a glossy cul­ture mag­a­zine is set ablaze at news that the man him­self is set to come out of exile after 30 years with album num­ber 18, and some spe­cial invites to a lis­ten­ing par­ty land on the desks of var­i­ous indus­try high-fliy­ers, but also, for some rea­son, Ayo Edebiri’s green­horn arts journo, Ariel Ecton. In the mix you’ve got gos­sip ped­dler Clara (Juli­ette Lewis), flesh-ped­dling Tik­Tokker Emi­ly (Stephanie Sug­ana­mi) plus an old guard paparazzi, a gonzo pro­fil­er and Ariel’s absolute-span­ner of an edi­tor, Stan (Mur­ray Bartlett). From the pri­vate jet and lux­u­ry cruis­er that whisks them to the Moret­ti com­pound, the gang believe they’re all set for a week­end of exclu­sive, insid­er lux­u­ry, but it’s a lit­tle more com­plex than that.

Writer-direc­tor Green was, back in the day, an edi­tor at GQ, and so has on-the-ground expe­ri­ence of this type of indul­gent jun­ket sit­u­a­tion. And yet so much of the film wrings false, from the depic­tion of a print pub­li­ca­tion that looks like it’s part of the For­tune 500, to the fact that no-one seems at all trou­bled by this unmedi­at­ed jour­ney into the unknown to laud the work of an A1 weirdo. (Ariel gets there even­tu­al­ly, but even she’s ini­tial­ly smitten).

Moret­ti, who is an amal­gam of Michael Jack­son, Elton John and an age­ing Italio-Dis­co mae­stro, has sur­round­ed him­self by what ini­tial­ly appears to be toad­y­ing staff, but they are in fact a bizarre reli­gious cult who engage in tor­tu­ous tri­als to mark their devo­tion. In a lit­tle tent in the mid­dle of the field, a mem­ber of the faith­ful sits and shucks oys­ters in search of a pearl, hands drip­ping with blood. It’s all very ran­dom and, in terms of its metaphor­i­cal intent, extreme­ly stri­dent, and even­tu­al­ly Green strug­gles to give Moret­ti an inter­est­ing moti­va­tion for his big return to the scene.

While a fair major­i­ty of the scenes and set-ups lack for deep­er res­o­nance, there’s a sur­face-lev­el sheen that does deliv­er some super­fi­cial thrills. Ede­biri is always good val­ue, and she sto­ical­ly attempts to draw the best out of the mate­r­i­al by treat­ing it with grave seri­ous­ness. And Malkovich chews the scenery and every­thing else as the lit­er­ary diva – though it’s nev­er tru­ly clear if we’re meant to think his music is actu­al­ly good or mere­ly deriv­a­tive hack­work that’s com­plete­ly out of time.