103 min | R | March 14, 2025 | A24
John Malkovich plays a reclusive pop star who invites journalists to his compound for a sinister plan. Ayo Edebiri tries to ground the chaos. The film can’t decide what it wants to be.
Thrillers about celebrity cults and dangerous charisma need to understand what makes people susceptible to manipulation. Opus sets up a scenario where a legendary musician who disappeared thirty years ago invites a group of sycophantic journalists and one skeptical writer to his remote Utah compound. Something terrible is going to happen. The film telegraphs this from the opening scene and then spins its wheels for an hour before delivering a climax that feels both inevitable and unearned.
Ayo Edebiri plays the journalist with intelligence and skepticism. She’s the audience surrogate, the person asking the right questions while everyone else drinks the Kool-Aid. Edebiri does strong work trying to anchor a film that refuses to be anchored. John Malkovich plays the pop star with theatrical menace and clearly enjoys himself. The performance is entertaining but one-note. Juliette Lewis, Murray Bartlett, and Amber Midthunder fill out the ensemble with characters that never develop beyond archetypes.
Mark Anthony Green directs his first feature and shows ambition without control. The film wants to be satire, horror, and psychological thriller simultaneously. It delivers none of them effectively. The pacing is sluggish. The reveals are obvious. The violence when it arrives feels grafted on rather than organic to the story. The production design creates an appropriately creepy compound but the film never uses the location to build sustained tension.
A24 released this and it disappeared quickly. The film has ideas about celebrity worship and artistic ego and the ways charisma can mask monstrosity. It just never figures out how to dramatize those ideas with clarity or purpose. Green shows potential. This needed more time in development.