Writer Ariel (Ayo Edebiri; The Bear) has worked at a music magazine for three years but in spite of coming up with great ideas, she never gets assigned stories.
“You’re middle as fuck,” says her boyfriend, by way of explanation, as they eat Japanese food together in New York. She’s only 27, not interesting or experienced enough to land the big interviews. And her lazy editor Stan (Murray Bartlett) just takes advantage of her fine research.
Nothing terribly unusual about that, perhaps, but it’s the only premise that makes sense in director Mark Anthony Green’s debut feature. He worked for years as a style and culture columnist for GQ magazine in the US and the pompously-titled Opus is a strange affair, full of celebrity-culture themes – too many – that go nowhere much while the influence of other, better horror movies, such as Get Out and The Menu, can be heard echoing haphazardly throughout.
However, although muddled, it’s visually compelling, with great shots of the New Mexican desert, and John Malkovich as Moretti, a reclusive pop star with legions of hysterical fans and a penchant for outsized, rather old-fashioned jewellery and sarongs, is, naturally, mesmerising, even though his songs (Nile Rodgers and The-Dream wrote the music, surprisingly) don’t live up to the imaginary hype. Is that deliberate? It’s unclear.
Finally ambitious Ariel gets her big break. Moretti invites a few media types to his remote, and rather unconvincing-looking, desert compound to listen to his first album in 30 years (remember Kanye West doing something similar in Wyoming in 2018?). One of the many unanswered questions is why Moretti has chosen these particular people to perform to and to punish.
Besides Ariel and the sycophantic Stan, there’s TV personality Clara (Juliette Lewis, pictured above, centre, with Murray Bartlett), influencer Emily (Stephanie Suganami), paparazza Bianca (Melissa Chambers), and another journo, soon to be eliminated, called Bill (Mark Sivertsen). We’re told that Bill incurred Moretti’s ire by writing a piece that mocked the fact that he got his dead Doberman stuffed. But it’s unclear what the others may have done to offend. Ariel is the most inexperienced, and therefore the most pure, among them, but she is, of course, the first to see that something is seriously rotten here. Everyone else is too much in thrall to Moretti’s fame and charisma.
It’s a press-trip nightmare. Phones and laptops are confiscated. Ariel’s sulky concierge (each guest is assigned one) pops bubble gum loudly outside her room and follows her everywhere, even on her morning jog. And another concierge/stylist wants to shave her “lady garden” for her. Moretti demands it of everyone, we’re never told why.
Moretti is not only a pop star – the Wizard of Wiggle, also known as the Debutante – but also, confusingly, the leader of a cult called the Levellers. They dress in blue, engage in pottery and painting – the kids put on unsettling puppet shows – and smile beatifically at Ariel as she jogs past. Ariel asks Moretti, who’s reclining by the pool while someone paints an abstract portrait of him, what the cult’s belief system consists of. But he can’t tell her much, apart from leading her to a tent where an acolyte is endlessly shucking oysters, looking for pearls. Is that a metaphor?
Whatever, things turn very nasty. Anyone can be a god at any moment, Moretti explains, bafflingly. Then violent deaths start to occur, including Emily choking on her own tongue. And Ariel? Will she escape? Can she remain uncorrupted by success? Are the Levellers part of Moretti’s evil world-domination right-brain plot? We’ll never know, and ultimately, it's difficult to care.
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