Please Reconsider: Opus
The 27% rating on Rotten Tomatoes is wrong!
Minor spoilers ahead - only enough to prove my point, not so much that you won’t still have a damn good time if you decide to reconsider!
A24 released Opus two weeks ago and in that time major publications have given it a premature death plummeting its IMDB rating to 5.9 and it’s Rotten Tomatoes score lower than 30%. I’d like for you, a normal person who consumes pop culture, to reconsider trusting these critics’ opinions on this movie because I think they’re too close to the source - they’re missing the forest for the proverbial trees. But not me, not you either. We can see it should we choose to pay attention.
Opus is a story about legacy. Our avatar and central player is a youngish journalist (she’s pushing 30, so not that young) who wants to be famous. She’s got a three step plan to write about famous people, get clout from that, and use it to write a book. When pushed for content on said book goal, Ariel (Ayo Edebiri) doesn’t have an answer - the subject is TBD, the important part is that now she’s got her own fame. She’s stuck on step one because her editor is giving away her ideas. Everything changes when the legendary pop star Alfred Moretti (John Malkovich) surprise announces his next album after a 30 year hiatus. Moretti invites a handful of tenured professionals who make the world of celebrity what it is - paparazzi, podcasters, influencers, talk show hosts, music journalists - to his reclusive home to preview the album so they can review it for their audiences. Moretti also invites Ariel, the lone youngblood who has absolutely no idea who Moretti is - she’s a blank slate that doesn’t have predetermined preferences and starry eyes for the pop god. Obviously, this is intentional on Moretti’s part - but we don’t know that yet and neither does Ariel.
So basically, think of it as getting a Golden Ticket to tour Wonka’s chocolate factory. Our crew gets to the remote location for this listening party weekend and, as we follow Ariel, we can see that this compound is a little bit off. Kinda culty, and so Ariel wants to investigate it. She’s pushed to the side by her editor, who is the only other journalist to be invited to the party, so she spends a good amount of time circulating with the people who live on the compound, called Levelists. Moretti takes a liking to Ariel because she’s honest with him when others are simply star struck, he shows her everything she asks to see about the Levelists, including their ritualistic shucking hunt for pearls in oysters (clearly a metaphor for the search to find something special).
Obviously, people start going missing and Ariel learns enough to be a threat. Chaos and chase follow.
But in the throws of all of this mystery chasing is a very poignant and fucking catchy story about fame and its orbit. Maybe one third of the way through my husband leaned over to me, excited, whispering “this is a commentary on Kanye from 2018!”. This was also pointed out in Pitchfork’s rather mean review, but I’m bragging briefly here because my husband needed to help to figure that out and I think that’s really hot. For my part, Kanye 2018 feels like 500 years. The brilliant bit about Moretti, as played by the legend John Malkovich (I said it once already but it didn’t feel like enough), is that it’s the combination of so many popstars - legacy acts and present - wrapped into one thing. He’s older but he’s unwilling to age, he’s got his 70s glam on still while trying to adapt his musical style to the modern day. For me, it totally worked. Apple Music served me “Dina, Simone” in January as a new song and I just figured it was some cool italo-disco track from a small band. I’d been listening to it non-stop for a solid month before I heard it play in the movie.
Anyway, I really don’t want to spoil this for you. So here’s my pitch - Opus is not a horror movie. As far as I can tell in searching the internet, no official source called it that - it’s a psychological thriller. People are comparing it to Midsommar and Get Out, they shouldn’t. Regarding Midsommar, the only similarity is: cult. But the cults are different in their DNA. It’s not a scary cult, they aren’t committing suicide or ritually murdering or inbreeding like the one in Midsommar. And regarding Get Out, the main characters are Black - that’s the similarity. So don’t trust the Google Gemini summary of Opus when it tries to say it’s a horror movie. That’s just the stupid algorithm synthesizing a bunch of wrong articles. Stated another way, A24 is allowed to put out multiple types of movies and it’s OK for a movie to be psychological without being horrific. This is not a high brow horror movie. It is not scary. It is not brutal. It is a truly glamorous thriller not a horror movie.
Opus is not a horror movie.
Opus is not a horror movie.
Opus is not a horror movie.
That is, unless you’re in the press. Which is why I think journalists are panning this film. They feel, rightly, called out. The whole message of Opus is legacy and fame come with a cost and it’s up to the people who write about and discuss famous people for a living to wield their power with purpose. For better or worse, they are the ones who are going to keep terrible people in the spotlight and romanticize their actions, however awful or uncouth they may be. Opus is writer/director Mark Anthony Green’s mirror to look at his past experiences as editor of GQ and our present state of pop-culture worship and it’s my thought that some journalists are having more trouble grappling with their own contributions to the zeitgeist and sway of culture so they are punishing Opus with bad ratings (27% rating on Rotten Tomatoes).
This is why I think you should reconsider checking out Opus if you had previously written it off because of publications like New York Times and Pitchfork. It’s a stacked cast with chemistry, good twists and turns, a bitchin’ soundtrack done by real life god of pop Nile Rodgers (with The-Dream), wonderful costuming, and some shocking cinematography. All of that in Green’s FIRST MOVIE EVER?! I can guarantee this is not the worst way to spend 1.75 hours, it’s a good time so don’t be a brat who won’t make their own mind up about art and find a showing this weekend.
