Ayo Edebiri is alarmed by John Malkovich's cult of personality in this A24 horror, that Film Brain feels is all too familiar...
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00:00Hello and welcome to Projector, and on this episode, Iowa Debris thinks something is very wrong with John Malkovich in the A24 horror opus.
00:09♫
00:26Ariel Ekton, played by Iowa Debris, is a young journalist struggling to make her mark.
00:31When the reclusive pop star Alfred Moretti, played by John Malkovich, releases his first album in 30 years,
00:37Ariel is mysteriously invited to join a small group of journalists at Moretti's private compound for the launch.
00:43But once there, Ariel is increasingly unnerved by the cult that Moretti is surrounding himself with, who call themselves the Levelers.
00:51Opus is the feature directorial debut of Mark Anthony Green, who was the former editor of GQ and wrote there for 13 years,
00:58which certainly explains the film's print media background.
01:02And because of that job, Green has obviously spent a lot of time in the company of celebrities doing interviews,
01:07so he's obviously put a fair bit of his own experience into the film, but hopefully with less cults.
01:13Green, however, has always wanted to be a filmmaker, and he left GQ to pursue his ambition.
01:19He's been working on the script for Opus for six years, and he wrote it with Iowa Debris in mind for the lead,
01:24even before she recently blew up because of her role in The Bear.
01:28And for someone who has spent all that time around celebrity, there's definitely a lot of room for a potential cutting satire on the idea that they're famous because they're better than us.
01:39As a journalist and interviewer, there's an inherent weirdness to going out and spending a few days in the company of people
01:45whose fame means that they're isolated in their own little bubbles away from the outside world,
01:51which makes it very unfortunate that not only is Opus pretty far from being a masterpiece, it hits a lot of bum notes along the way.
01:59To Opus's credit, the first half shows plenty of early promise, and a lot of that is down to the casting of Adebri in the lead role.
02:06Adebri's Ariel is desperate to try and prove herself, but she's not been getting the opportunities to actually do so.
02:13Her boss Stan, played by Murray Bartlett, is more than happy to hear her pitches and then give them to other writers,
02:20as well as try and take the credit and the best opportunities for himself.
02:24Stan is also far more on our with being in the company of celebrity than Ariel is, as he accompanies her to Moretti's compound,
02:30and he's openly happy to see her return to the kind of big junkets they used to hang out with his fellow journalists on.
02:37Ariel, on the other hand, is much more of an opportunist.
02:40She talks about how she plans to write about celebrities because, quote,
02:43they're inherently more interesting, by which she means they're an easy way to get published and move on to the things that she actually wants to write.
02:50But her friend Ken, played by Young Mazino, tells Ariel that her writing doesn't pop because she lacks actual life experience,
02:57and honestly, she's in the middle, but most people are.
03:01And yes, it is very weird that he calls it the middle. Don't we call that mid these days? Or to put it another way, she's basic.
03:09And now that Ariel's been personally selected to meet Moretti, it's a chance to finally prove herself.
03:15But because she's far more sceptical of celebrity culture, she almost immediately starts getting some very strange vibes even before she ventures into Moretti's compound.
03:25And Adebri is mostly known for comedy, especially in her big screen roles with only a few exceptions.
03:31And while she does bring some of that to her initial interactions, like jotting creepy greeter in her notes,
03:37this is actually her in a much more serious, straight role.
03:40The discomfort and anxiousness that she often uses in her humour, especially in her physicality and expressions, is instead mined for tension.
03:49She's almost constantly weirded out by the sycophantic behaviour by her levelers, and the way that they follow and watch the journalist's movements constantly,
03:57with Ariel getting her own personal surveillance in the form of Amber Midthunder's Belle.
04:01Amber Midthunder, of course, being from Prey, and actually co-starring in Novocaine, which was released on exactly the same day as this was.
04:10And Adebri proves that she's more than capable of holding her own in a horror film, as the more the film goes on,
04:15the more she feels that something is deeply wrong, and is just desperate to leave.
04:21Adebri makes her responses feel credible and relatable, and she makes this more engaging. To a point.
04:28But the big showy role is obviously John Malkovich, in probably some of the best work he's done in quite some time.
04:34Malkovich has actually spent quite a few years slumming it in low-budget direct-to-video stream movies for the cash,
04:40so this is a return to form for him, playing an archetypal Malkovich role, someone who's eccentric, with a dangerous and menacing side, with a superiority complex.
04:51And that description pretty much fits Moretti down to a T.
04:54Although, buying John Malkovich as someone who is the world's most famous pop star is a bit of a stretch, let alone someone who is famous for his wiggle.
05:04It's worth noting the film has music from Nile Rodgers and The Dream, who are also executive producers, and they created the original songs for Moretti,
05:12which are genuinely good tracks. They almost have this kind of electro-dance vibe, with a seductive, haunting edge, but also just that little bit strange.
05:23And you can kind of understand why people are so enthralled to him. The character is basically a grab-bag of a load of different pop stars,
05:30so you've got elements of Jared Leto, David Bowie, Michael Jackson, even Charles Manson, all just kind of mashed up together,
05:38and Malkovich is given full license to just ham it up, playing a tightrope of being scary and funny in just how weird he is.
05:47You get scenes where Moretti puts on a Daft Punk-style helmet and starts dancing and gyrating to one of his songs,
05:53grinding up against the journalist, or talking to his disciples as he starts crawling across the floor.
05:59It's a big, showy performance, and one that tries its best to hide the fact that Moretti is not entirely a consistent character, or even defined all that well.
06:09The film doesn't even really explain specifically why he disappeared for so long in the first place.
06:15What clearly drives Moretti, though, is a desire to be worshipped for his art, and to be so unquestionably,
06:22so he's surrounded himself with people who hang on his every word and thought, and believes in his inherent superiority and meritocracy because he's a genius creator.
06:32The Levelers are driven by their own devotion to the creative arts as being the highest form of human expression,
06:38and many of them are giving up their own past lives when Moretti contacted them, almost like they were touched by the hand of God himself.
06:46You can see the obvious parallels to modern-day fandoms of celebrities, which are so intensely protected of their favourites,
06:52they'll be willing to fight other fandoms or individuals on their behalf.
06:56There's a reason why the term Stan from the Eminem song has entered the mainstream, because these are basically a church of Stans.
07:04Green sums this up in the film's key scene, which is a big old SYMBOLISM MOMENT.
07:10Moretti shows Errol the Leveler ritual of shucking open oysters to find pearls, which is a metaphor built on multiple levels.
07:17For instance, it's partly to do with the idea of creativity and striving for success, about finding that brilliant idea that makes you famous, that rare pearl.
07:27But it's also reinforcing the idea of selectiveness, that only a chosen few will become famous because THEY are the pearl, and THEY should be prized and cherished.
07:39The Levelers all bear scars on their hands because of this process, and what Green is saying is that fame inherently leaves a mark,
07:47that there is something about it that is inherently damaging, and Moretti takes that to an extreme.
07:53Likewise, there's a later scene with a rat puppet show about Billie Holiday that is a critique about the way the press treats celebrities,
07:59asking questions that alternate between asinine and invasive about how the press destroys celebrities for sport.
08:07Obviously, we're not meant to entirely agree with all that, because Moretti is clearly unhinged,
08:12but these moments where Green puts his commentary close to the surface are its strongest,
08:17and if you told me that he came up with these scenes and constructed the rest of the film around them, I'd believe it.
08:23And that's because Green doesn't really knit these big ideas into a cohesive script.
08:29Opus has a lot of story issues, and one of the biggest is that it doesn't nail the tone.
08:34In fact, there's a rather obvious lack of horror in Opus for a long stretch of it.
08:38There's not enough suspense or sense of menace being built up, and the satire isn't funny or sharp enough to make up for that.
08:45The supporting cast is very underdeveloped, especially the fellow invited, like Juliette Lewis,
08:51as a TV chat show host who is given very little to do at all.
08:54There's also an influencer, a paparazzi, and a fellow musician that Moretti has had a feud with,
08:59and fleshing out these characters into more than just one-dimensional types would have helped give it a bit more substance.
09:06It's one of those horror films that knows it's struggling to set an atmosphere,
09:09so it kills off one of the characters very early on so that we know that something sinister is happening,
09:14because otherwise, there's very little to create a sense of terror.
09:18And there is this idea that all the other attendees just shrug off their increasingly dwindling numbers
09:23or make excuses for Moretti's behaviour because they want to keep their access and exclusives,
09:28but the film never quite pries that out.
09:31But it's the second half where Opus rapidly falls apart.
09:34For a long while, I was patient with it as it takes its time that surely it must be leading somewhere.
09:41The characters all get itineraries, there must be a grand plan on Moretti's part,
09:46and then the movie plays its hand, and there isn't really.
09:49He just starts killing them, and there's no real theatricality or inventiveness to it.
09:54It just shatters all that intrigue and promise that have been built up because you wait so long to go,
10:00is that it?
10:02There's so little payoff after all the build-up, and it just feels rushed through.
10:06Moretti's motivations are so simplistic and obvious that they're casually mentioned in a late exposition dub,
10:12and the more that you think about it, the more the film completely falls apart in retrospect.
10:18Like, what is the point of doing most of the theatrics if that was the plan?
10:23If he can just kill one of them without much fanfare,
10:26why doesn't he just do that for everyone else instead of building to a sense of ritual that goes nowhere?
10:32The answer, of course, is there wouldn't be much of a movie without it, but Opus is filled with faulty logic.
10:38Not least when the film adds a final sting in the tail where Moretti apparently had a crystal ball
10:43and knew exactly how things would play out, even though, if you watch the film in the moment,
10:47the way that several characters act doesn't line up at all with this final reveal.
10:52It tries to pull the rug so hard trying to be clever that it ends up pulling it out from under itself.
10:57But perhaps the reason why the film struggles to build suspense
11:01might also be down to the fact that it all feels so familiar.
11:05Opus feels very much like if you constructed the plot of an A24 movie out of a fridge magnet set.
11:10It all feels very tropey.
11:12Opus feels very reminiscent of so many of these social commentary horror films
11:17we've had over the last several years, where they were produced by A24 or not.
11:22I spent a lot of it comparing it to Blink twice,
11:25and while those similarities are coincidental as they were being made at the same time,
11:29that movie is a so much more confident debut feature than this one.
11:34But the art criticism satire evokes the menu,
11:37the cultist and broad daylight feels like Midsommar,
11:40it even does that trendy aspect ratio shift thing,
11:43and even that works against it because most of the film is in scope.
11:48And then, in the final couple of minutes, it expands out as a character's mind is being blown.
11:54What this means, though, is that undermines the mostly beautiful cinematography,
11:58because no matter where you see this in a cinema,
12:01you're going to get black bars at the top and bottom for almost the entire film,
12:05or even worse, like I did, window boxed on all four sides on a scoped screen.
12:11I genuinely thought it was being projected wrong,
12:14but no, it turns out it's an awful distracting affectation.
12:18Of course, it's taking the most from the forbearer of this kind of film, Get Out.
12:22Now, that wasn't an A24 flick, but they certainly codified it
12:26and made it into a formula that they've used in their original horror films.
12:29Opus pretty shamelessly wants to be Get Out for journalists,
12:33but Jordan Peele's film felt genuinely fresh and different, and it still holds up to this day.
12:38But Opus feels like tired, reheated cliches.
12:43It wants so hard to be Get Out or any of these other films
12:46that it doesn't develop an identity of its own.
12:49I'm being quite tough on Opus, but that's because I was so disappointed by it.
12:53Some of the commentary on celebrity and creativity does have some bite,
12:57but it's stranded as a script that doesn't work as a story on its own terms.
13:02And if it wasn't for Iowa Debrie and John Malkovich carrying this,
13:05this wouldn't work for as long as it does.
13:07But even then, they can't stop this from becoming a frustrating mess.
13:12A lot of clever, inventive original horror films have followed in the footsteps of Get Out,
13:16but this misses the mark, and it all feels so routine.
13:21It isn't completely terrible, but to quote the film,
13:25it's very much in the middle.
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13:48Until next time, I'm Matthew Buck, feeding out.