Opus review: Ayo Edebiri shines but half-baked cult thriller fails to indoctrinate

If Opus proves anything, it’s that Ayo Edebiri has the range and chutzpah to become a tentpole star if she’s ever able to land the right project.

There’s only so much we can take of the out-of-nowhere dynamo, who feels like she rocketed to success in a matter of months, being the best thing about an either lacklustre or under-seen product.

Her stunning role as Sydney in the TV masterpiece The Bear felt rather under-served and repetitive in its most recent season, widely considered its weakest, while the funny but forgettable Bottoms and underrated Theatre Camp cemented her as a comedic force.

Edebiri’s voice work was also rather overshadowed by Maya Hawke in Inside Out 2, while only the geekiest audiences caught her brilliant April O’Neil in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.

Now, surreal musical-horror Opus comes with the promise of the star in her first major leading role as Ariel Ecton, a journalist and aspiring young writer who gets the opportunity of a lifetime when she’s invited to cover the long-awaited comeback of an ingenious yet elusive pop star, Alfred Moretti (played by John Malkovich).

Malkovich is on top, sinister form as the flamboyant King of Pop, somewhere between Elton John and Michael Jackson, whose ominous compound in the middle of nowhere quickly reveals itself as an isolated cult populated by sycophantic followers.

Unfortunately, Edebiri and Malkovich’s verve for the material is not quite enough to elevate the woefully under-developed script, which raises more questions than it answers and fails to produce many genuine laughs, and even fewer effective scares.

Ariel is just one of a group of journalists, from vivacious TV presenter Clara Armstrong (Juliette Lewis at her best), Ariel’s boss Stan (Murray Bartlett in one of his most sauceless roles yet) and a handful of forgettable others tasked with covering the long-awaited record. While the older guests are blindsided by Moretti’s eccentricities to the point of delusion, Ariel is lumped with the singer’s acolytes and immediately smells something fishy when the group is forced to hand over their phones and assigned a cultist to stalk them everywhere they go.

This element is particularly egregious, with a near-silent Amber Midthunder given next to nothing to do despite her star-making turn in 2022’s Prey promising a riveting tête-à-tête between two contemporaries that fizzles out, quite literally, behind closed doors.

Edebiri still works well as Opus’ skeptical lead, selling herself as the only logical member of the trip who gets across baffled frustration when a series of alarming incidents begin to set off red flags. She bounces off Malkovich’s leery charm perfectly, but that relationship is never developed enough to weigh the predictable horror beats with much intensity or complexity.

It’s also impossible to tell if Moretti’s fictional tracks are any good. Nile Rodgers and The-Dream’s names in the credits as the film’s songwriters could be an indication they’re supposed to be taken as genuine bops, and a dreamy, Kylie Minogue-esque single titled Dina, Simone that kicks off the odyssey into popstar madness may have been destined to become a gay club anthem had Opus actually delivered the goods elsewhere.

The repetitive, vapid nature of the tracks soon sets in, however, and not even a gloriously gyrating performance from Malkovich was enough to convince me Moretti’s long-awaited comeback (given the knowingly pretentious name Caesar’s Request) would generate its own cult following.

Edebiri’s presence as the only Black guest is enough to simply gesture at some wider themes at play, but is rarely tackled head-on, something first-time director Mark Anthony Green seems to tread carefully around to avoid inevitable comparisons to Jordan Peele’s 2015 masterpiece Get Out and its imitators.

Instead, Opus is more preoccupied with the cult of celebrities and the cowardice and complacency of their followers, a timely matter that demands to be scrutinised with greater sophistication than the debut filmmaker currently has to offer, but nevertheless shows promise in pursuing. There are some wild, gruesome and often bizarre swings throughout the narrative that unfortunately never coalesce to genuine impact.

When the inevitable lurch towards horror does happen it feels half-baked and easy, and a rather rambly epilogue won’t leave you with the feeling the grand scheme was building towards a satisfying treatise or conversation starter beyond the latest celebrity scandal.

Perhaps our parasocial relationships with the rich and famous have desensitised us to the idea of our favourite artists becoming monsters so much that it’s hard to be shocked when the possibility is fictionalised to its most extreme conclusion.

There may well be a masterpiece hidden within the premise of a pop star driven insane by their own success and becoming wrapped up in a dangerous cult but, as the recent HBO flop The Idol also proved, we’ve not found it yet.

Opus is in cinemas from Friday, 14th March.