Alfred Morettis Opus

Opus (2025) is the newest movie from A24 and it was very underwhelming, but it wasn't terrible.

Positives for Opus (2025): The movie has an interesting enough plot involving the music industry. The acting is very good for what they had to work with. There are some cool things with the directing style. The movie moves at a good pace to it. And finally, the movie has a very interesting ending.

Negatives for Opus (2025): The plot has some wonky execution to it. The characters aren't interesting or well developed. I barely knew what was happening with the story. And finally, I have no idea what the point of this movie was supposed to be.

Overall, Opus (2025) is an okay but also very underwhelming movie from A24.

Opus wants to be daring and profound but mostly gives in to pretentiousness. John Malkovich is electric as a deranged ex-pop star cult leader, but everything else around him fails. The film throws gaudy images and provocative scenes against the wall and hopes something will stick-little does.

Director Mark Anthony Green is more interested in being provocative than in coming up with a coherent narrative. Characters vanish, tone shifts at random, and anything that attempts to be satirical is submerged in the bedlam. It's like a fever dream of film school with a decent soundtrack.

There's something here, but it's buried beneath masses of over-written trash and "weird for weirdness' sake" choices. One of the most frustrating films of the year-not because it's awful, but because it had the potential to be something amazing.

This had good potential and John Malkovich can usually be relied upon when eccentricity is needed, but the rest of this is an incomplete and rather messy reminder of "Midsommar" meets "Ten Little Indians". He is the reclusive pop star "Moretti" who announces after almost thirty years away, that he is to release his comeback album. The industry goes wild for this news and when he announces his own version of a golden ticket and invites a select group to join him for an exclusive get together at his ranch, the enthusiast journalist "Ariel" (Ayo Edebiri) accompanies her limelight hogging boss to this ultimate weekend. Of course, as soon as she arrives she finds the place akin to a cult. Loads of almost automaton acolytes, some cruelly painful oyster shucking and loads of sexually fluid flamboyance from their host all starts to get her heckles up and gradually we become aware that their is an altogether ulterior motive for this carefully contrived fine dining experience. When one of their number goes missing, well things rapidly speed to a denouement that is straight out of Agatha Christie. The point it makes in the end is actually quite a clever one, but the rest of this is all derivative and simplistic. Why were this group selected? Who are they? What have they in common with each other or with their antagonist? For something that's supposed to be random and spontaneous, the entire plot depends on characters making very specific (and not always the most natural of) choices en route. Malkovich does stand out, but that might also be as much to do with the really mediocre writing and the remainder of the cast delivering a very join-the-dots performance. Sadly, this is nothing original nor special and really disappoints.

I had high hopes for Opus, especially since it promised to explore the dark side of celebrity culture. John Malkovich is incredible as always, playing Alfred Moretti, a reclusive pop star inviting industry elites to his mysterious desert compound. The setting was stunning, and the mood was appropriately eerie. But somewhere along the way, the story lost me. It felt like the film wanted to be profound and unsettling, but it didn't have enough depth to really deliver. The characters felt like caricatures, and the horror elements were stylish but shallow. It's one of those films where the concept is better than the execution. I wanted to be immersed, but I ended up feeling detached.

What starts as a tense, creepy, something's-off-here cult movie ends as a confusing mess with little to no payoff.

The acting by the leads (Edebiri, Malkovich, Bartlett) was superb, whereas the other characters were all lacking depth, boring, and filler for the sake of what this movie considers to be "plot." Edebiri, as always, is fantastic at her craft, able to express so many emotions in her facial expressions, eye movements, and tone of voice. Malkovich is wonderful and plays the icon of Moretti perfectly. Bartlett plays a lovable asshole who you would never want as your boss, and he's damn good at the role.

A lot of the odd elements in this movie felt like things the writers threw in for the sake of making the movie feel more eerie and unsettling while simultaneously never offering any explanation or reason as to why they were included.

The first act felt a little long, act two ramped up way too fast and increased the stakes way too soon, and act three was a mess that had no pacing direction whatsoever. The very middle of act two felt like what should have been the midway point of act three, so when act three starts everything feels rushed to try and catch up with the feelings evoked already in the previous act.

What I watched was a hodgepodge of ideas with a half-baked story poorly attempting to tie it all together. It's as if someone mashed together Jonestown, pop icons David Bowie and Prince, Midsommar, and Get Out into a giant nothing burger. Really disappointed in this, though I still feel like it's worth seeing once just to feel the weight of certain scenes that were actually executed great. Even the cinematography was stunning, but the plot was a turd painted gold. 5.5/10.