In recent years, it has become standard practice for films and television to simply coast on “vibes” instead of having a coherent plot.
Mickey 17, Yellowjackets, White Lotus and Priscilla all spring to mind as projects that attempt to coast on vibes alone at the expense of substance.
Opus is the latest in this movement to bring back the trend of visuals over plot, and we eagerly await the day this movement is brought to an end – only David Lynch and Wong Kar-Wai can get away with vibes-based cinema.
Opus follows a young journalist, played by Ayo Edebiri, who is tasked with accompanying her editor to the remote compound of a reclusive pop megastar played by John Malkovich.
Malkovich’s character, we are told, is an artist on the level of Michael Jackson, David Bowie or Freddie Mercury, and the novelty of seeing Malkovich in that kind of pop superstar role is reason enough to see this movie.
Edebiri and her editor, along with TV host Juliette Lewis, are invited to be the first people in the world to hear the new album, which we are told is his first album in 30 years.
Guests who arrive at the compound that weekend are told to forfeit their phones and laptops, and you can tell from a mile out that things are going to go wrong.
What follows is a film that has no idea how to execute its own set-up.
Credit to Malkovich, he gives the film 110%, and he gives the film a performance it doesn’t deserve; he embraces the role with relish, making it his best performance since Burn After Reading in 2008.
Malkovich has had many career highlights over the years, most notably his unforgettable Oscar-nominated turn in the Clint Eastwood thriller In The Line Of Fire.
The 1993 film is a high point for director Wolfgang Petersen and stars Clint Eastwood and John Malkovich.
Malkovich’s performance as an unhinged would-be presidential assassin is a high watermark of ’90s thriller cinema and still holds up.
Clint Eastwood’s “I’m just a tough old man being railroaded by the system” shtick that he has dined out on for the last 35 years is at its best when he’s playing the cat-and-mouse game with Malkovich, while Petersen’s direction elevates it to high art.
If that digression felt like an unfocused turn that put the review out of whack, that roughly replicates the experience of watching Opus.
Rule of thumb for aspiring filmmakers: don’t make the person reviewing the film wish they were watching other films involving the actor; it just invites trouble.
Opus can never quite pin down what it wants to be; it doesn’t know if it wants to be a social satire thriller like The Menu, an exploration of the cult of celebrity ala Sunset Boulevard or a folk horror in the ilk of The Wicker Man.
The best description for Opus is like using a car radio in an area with patchy reception; you scan through the different stations trying to get a decent signal, you hear a bit of a song you know, and then you lose the signal again.
Opus is written and directed by first-time filmmaker Mark Anthony Green, a journalist in a past life.
Plenty of journalists have become acclaimed filmmakers, the likes of Wilder, Godard, Crowe, Truffaut, Bogdonavich and Chan-Wook spring to mind.
Based on his debut outing, Green is quite a ways off from joining that esteemed group.
Green clearly had enough clout to get stars like Edebiri, Malkovich and Lewis on board, and they buy into his script for better or for worse.
Edebiri, in particular, deserves much better than what the film saddles her with; anyone who has watched The Bear (another show that has fallen into the vibes over plot trap) knows how brilliantly talented she is, and she gives a performance the film doesn’t deserve.
Scott Parker won accolades for trying to keep West Ham from being relegated in the 2010/11 Premier League season – when the team around him was dire, he always gave 110% and ended up going on to bigger and better things.
For the first time in recorded history, Ayo Edebiri is being compared to Scott Parker.
The issues with Opus lay with the script; Green is a solid director who can deploy a nice aerial shot or a long take when necessary, but he cannot write a script to save his life.
Opus had the potential to be a fascinating deconstruction of the cult of celebrity; why is it that we hold the same image of a particular celebrity in our head for decades, and how much of our collective cultural identity is wrapped up in nostalgia?
In that paragraph, we interrogated the central premise of the film much better than the film itself.
Another weird twist to Opus is that Malkovich’s character is supposedly an Elvis or Beatles-level artist who changed the culture forever, and Malkovich himself sings songs written by Nile Rodgers and The Dream.
We appreciate the effort of getting actual hitmakers to write real pop songs for a movie, but the snippets of songs we hear in the film sound more like middle-of-the-road George Michael singles than his earlier defining solo work.
If, however, you want to see a movie where John Malkovich prances around in a gold outfit like a mix of Liberace and Darth Vader, Opus answers your very specific prayers.
On these very pages, we bemoan the lack of originality in film and television – this week alone, Netflix are about to unleash a miserable $300 million adaptation of The Electric State on the world, an instantly disposable piece of slop for the algorithm – but Opus is so confident that it’s saying something profound about modern celebrity culture when in fact it has nothing to say at all.
Considering Opus was written and directed by a former journalist, it could have used a stern editor who told them the first draft wasn’t good enough and to go back to the drawing board.