Opus

Day

Opus
Directed by Mark Anthony Green
USA 2025
A24

There have been a lot of A24 movies coming out recently. Now, the word of mouth on Opus seems to be quite bad but, I reckon this is to do with two specific elements. Firstly, the expectation that it’s a horror film. It’s not. Now, it could have gone that way for sure and the trailer hints that it might have had the possibility to veer towards that direction but, my own reaction to the trailer was that, yeah, this one did not look like a horror movie and, certainly, A24 have been moving away from those a little too. So I suspect all the people going to the cinema to see a horror film may have been a little disappointed. Not me though, I got exactly what I was expecting to see… a fairly tight, well made and very unsettling thriller.

It starts off pretty strongly with a credit sequence that focuses on people dancing at a pop concert. But it doesn’t really look at crowds, just sequences of individuals against a dark background (much like some of those old Shaw Brothers kung fu movies) and focussing on their movements and faces, almost like a direct call back to the kind of ‘typage’ shots Sergei Eisenstein was pumping out in his films back in the 1920s.

After that fairly lengthy sequence, we’re then thrown quickly into the main plot and the character of a young journalist called Ariel, played brilliantly by Ayo Edebiri, whose boss has not been giving her the breaks she needs to advance her career, after three years with her newspaper. And then, out of the blue, an old, legendary pop star phenomenon, Alfred Moretti (played in much exaggerated fashion by John Malkovich, I’ll get to him in a minute), comes out of retirement after thirty years in the wilderness and a handful of journalists are personally invited to stay the weekend at his ranch, which amounts to an enclosed village community, in order to hear his new album, Caeser’s Request. Included in the invites are Ariel, her boss (played by Murray Bartlett), a TV show host (played by the always watchable Juliette Lewis) and an influencer played by Stephanie Suganami.

And when they get there for their weekend programme of learning, manicures, fashion pampering etc, they are even assigned their own concierge… Ariel’s being played by the always cool Amber Midthunder. But here’s the thing… the whole place worships Moretti (he even has a CLAP4ME numberplate on his private bus) and so do his guests, apart from Ariel who seems to be the only one who has her head screwed on, even when things start to seem slightly off. In fact, the whole thing shows the signs of being a ‘cult’ set up, which is a religion practiced by Moretti called Levelism (any digs at rubbish like scientology are, I’m sure, well earned).

And like I said at the start of this… it’s very unsettling but, also, quite expertly put together. For example, there’s a scene which is a close up montage of a man cracking open Oyster shells with a knife and it’s very intense and aggressively edited to get a certain mood across. And while the film is peppered with some great and silly throw away lines such as “You have Pam Greer’s bone structure.”, the off kilter tension keeps building as Ariel realises how much of a prisoner she has become this weekend.

And then there’s Moretti himself… the legendary music star who has a reputation greater than Prince, Madonna and The Beatles combined. Malkovich plays him intensely but, I would say, thoroughly tongue-in-cheek and has a lot of scenery chewing fun with it. I think some people maybe missed this distinction in his interpretation because there’s a thoroughly preposterous scene where he does an up close and personal song and dance performance for his small group of guests and, yeah, it’s one of the most over-the-top performances I’ve seen. And I suspect this is the other thing where the audience is either going to lose it or stick with it. I embraced the silliness of it because I realised it was a joke (I hope) but.. yeah… I suspect this is where the film loses a lot of people. Which is a shame because, from this point on, the story gets really sinister and, for all the guests, pretty life threatening. It’s very similar in tone to the earlier A24 hit which I didn’t much care for, Midsommar (reviewed here), but for me that kind of intimidating atmosphere of lurking threat really pays off here.

Also, the editing is good and there’s some nice directorial choices made here which you wouldn’t necessarily expect to see in an American made movie. For instance, a crucial and quite brutal fight scene between to characters towards the end of the movie is not, except for a small amount of the opening of the fight, shown on camera. Instead, the camera focuses on a locked door outside the room in which the fight is taking place and held for a long time while the audience hears the rawness of the struggle occurring behind the door. And it’s moments like this that make the film worth sitting through, I would say.

Now the end is a mixed bag. It has kind of a triple ending when I was only expecting one but, in terms of the second ending which takes place two years later, I thought there was a missed opportunity to greatly turn the tables on the main protagonist and I can’t help but think that a certain interview scene may well have been originally scripted to end in a much different (and perhaps more obvious) way. Having said that, the final little scene where a surviving protagonist (I won’t tell you which one) is being interviewed does have an echo of what this other scene might have been but, by that point it feels more like an after thought or, you know, a director trying to please his producers but also give a hint of what really happened next.

Either way, though, I really enjoyed Opus and I think it’s easily the best of the A24 films I’ve seen put out this year (although I haven’t seen Warfare yet, which is supposed to be quite uncompromisingly gruelling). This one, though, hits all the right thriller vibes and has some great performances in it. A very well put together piece of movie making.