Opus is a film written/directed by Mark Anthony Green. It premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. A lot of people were looking forward to it because of the stacked cast of great character actors who are in it and the star on the rise Ayo Edebiri who can do no wrong right now regarding her career choices. Unfortunately, though, for me, this is a miss in her otherwise stellar filmography so far, and great work she’s done on The Bear.  As actors will tell you, not everything connects with the audience. It’s a shame because this one had all the makings of something special.

Ariel Ecton (Ayo Edebiri) is a fledgling writer who gets a once in a lifetime offer to go to the secluded compound of a reclusive singer/ musician Alfred Moretti (John Malkovich) to get to hear his first music he’s put out in many years, along with a group of other journalists and influences. What she finds when she gets there is a cult full of sycophants and followers who worship the ground this man stands on. She has to do anything and everything she can to escape, but was escaping this idyllic place the right thing to do? That’s the million dollar question.

This film seemed easily similar to a couple of other movies I’ve seen in recent months. Blink Twice, specifically, comes to mind when I think of this movie. Stop me when you see what I’m saying. A Black woman is wooed to a secret compound with dreams of making her career and life better. See what I’m saying? This isn’t a straightforward horror film, though it’s more of a satire on cults and movies about cults. The other one that comes to mind is Midsummar from Ari Aster. The cultists known as Levelists are very familiar to the men and women that film who have a devotion to some kind of divine being similar to that of John Malkovich’s character. I’ve seen enough of this stuff in the last few years to last me a lifetime. Give me something fresh and new.

Ayo Edebiri is a fantastic young actress. The last couple of years, she’s been on fire with The Bear on Hulu and films such as Bottoms, Theater Camp, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem,under her belt. She’s not the problem with this movie, though. She is completely committed to this role and all that it encompasses.  It’s the script that fails her and the rest of the cast. Everybody else is having a blast cracking up and winking at the camera, and she’s playing it straight. That didn’t work for me. I want to see her in more films and season three of The Bear because I know she is a great young actress. This movie wasn’t a good choice for her from my perspective. The writer/director is to blame for this mess of a satire that didn’t make me laugh once. Not her at all. She’ll bounce back, though.

Satire is something a writer/director has to hone over years. You just can’t come out of the gate with your first film being a satire of something filmgoers have seen done before. This movie was a mixed bag because it seemed to me Edibiri and the other actors weren’t on the same page. Most were going with the goofy comedic cult theme, especially Malkovich, while she was playing it straight. I get the goofy satire of the cult thing. It’s not a problem for me. It’s that the tone was so very different from the first and second half of the film.  Comedy isn’t usually my thing, but I will laugh when I find things funny, and this wasn’t funny at all.  I do applaud the actors for going for it, though, even though the script was bad.

Besides Edebiri the cast is stacked with fantastic actors like Murray Bartlett (The White Lotus), Juliette Lewis (Yellowjackets), and Tony Hale (Veep) as well as the aforementioned  Malkovich to name a handful. They all try their best to make this story believable, but it’s sad to see them wasted even though all are still fantastic actors in the end. They’ll get better projects down the road that will make people forget about this dismal film. It’s sad, though, for me because I was looking forward to them all shing instead of being basically dull most of the time.

As I mentioned, this is a movie dealing with a cult. The cultists are robbed in blue outfits, while Malkovich’s character has all kinds of elaborate robes and frocks.  He changes his clothes from scene to scene, and it’s a bit jarring at times. The location of the cult, Level if you will, is in a beautiful desert location. The buildings and surroundings are well designed. All the people have jobs and responsibilities and so forth. One of the jobs is shocking oysters to find pearls. That was a bit over the top if you asked me. Another job is that the followers are shadowing the six guests that visit the compound. Amber Midthunder plays one of them, and she takes her role in this capacity to the next level, no pun intended. All of this weirdness was meant to be creepy, and it definitely was from perspective.  Even though it was very similar to other films like it.

The theme of the story was about a reclusive singer/musician, but after hearing the songs and Malkovich sing, I wasn’t that big of a fan of this aspect of the movie. I was hoping for some good music, and instead, I got a bunch of ramblings of an old man who lost his sense of reality. To me, that was the bedrock the story was built on, and that bedrock crumbled pretty quickly. I was disappointed by this . I was hoping to at least get some good rock or folk music while I was watching this crazy movie. Alas, even that failed me and the film.

Opus had so much potential,  but was squandered by an uneven script, acting from some that weren’t on the same page as others, bad music and an overall repetitive theme I’ve seen recently more than I’d have liked to. In the hands of a more seasoned comedic director, this plot and premise may have been handled better. Green drops the ball at every chance he could at redeeming this film and himself as a writer/director. I feel bad saying this, but this was a mess of a movie that wasted a pretty amazing cast.

2 stars

Dan Skip Allen