Metacritic reviews

O'Dessa delivers a bold, catchy musical set in a vibrant cyberpunk world that mixes naturalistic visuals with an aesthetic indebted to 1980s sci-fi and fantasy films. Sadie Sink shines as a singer who can change the world with her ballads, with a gender norm-defying performance and an enchanting singing voice.

There’s a lot of talent on the screen, some catchy music, and some wonderful visuals and design choices, but none of it ever quite adds up to something bigger, leaving us with a film that’s ambitious but strangely hollow.

There’s too much passion and creativity on display to declare “O’Dessa” a complete catastrophe, but the committed performances and detailed production design and costumes all come across as the product of bibles’ worth of backstory that couldn’t possibly be carried over with the constraints of time.

There’s a distinctive eye here, and a promising sense of ambition. But in its current form, there’s not enough meat on its (admittedly cool-looking) bones to justify its 106-minute run time.

While O’Dessa has a lot of style, it doesn’t have much else. Its substance is sorely lacking, with a lot of jumbled ideas and themes that don’t come together.

The blunt truth is that there’s very little that’s original or even interesting in this empty rehash of many a recent YA franchise with occasional pauses for song.

For all the faults O'Dessa has, it's clearly a film made with an abundance of passion and creativity. It's a gender-swapped, punk rock, post-apocalyptic reinvention of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. It's also a movie that largely doesn't work and trips over its own ambition.

Yes, great musicals have been built on “the power of love” before. But pulling that off requires something this movie never has: a heartbeat.

Everyone’s stumbling along in a vaguely defined universe, which really only serves as a backdrop to catchy musical numbers that evolve from folk to pop rock.

Sometimes it’s so bad it’s almost entertaining, but mostly you can hardly see the screen because each frame induces an eye-squeezing cringe.