Opus review – off-key pop industry satire misses all its cues

A film’s greatness is sometimes not confirmed at the moment of its inception and initial release. Sometimes, we need to take a step back and see just how far a work has penetrated the collective consciousness, often by counting how many other people have attempted to make a film in its image. Judging by the sheer volume of films and TV works that offer a riff on Jordan Peele’s Get Out, we can now definitively say that it is a great movie. But also, we should absolutely not blame it for the quality of its legacy.

To wit: Mark Anthony Green’s Opus adopts the Get Out template, almost part and parcel, to tell of malaise in the music industry via the return of obscenely famous electro pop titan Alfred Mortetti played by (checks notes) John Malkovich. Following his world-dominating early success and run of 17 hit albums, Moretti shunned the limelight and retreated to a remote desert ranch and did… who knows what?

The weekly features meeting at a glossy culture magazine is set ablaze at news that the man himself is set to come out of exile after 30 years with album number 18, and some special invites to a listening party land on the desks of various industry high-fliyers, but also, for some reason, Ayo Edebiri’s greenhorn arts journo, Ariel Ecton. In the mix you’ve got gossip peddler Clara (Juliette Lewis), flesh-peddling TikTokker Emily (Stephanie Suganami) plus an old guard paparazzi, a gonzo profiler and Ariel’s absolute-spanner of an editor, Stan (Murray Bartlett). From the private jet and luxury cruiser that whisks them to the Moretti compound, the gang believe they’re all set for a weekend of exclusive, insider luxury, but it’s a little more complex than that.

Writer-director Green was, back in the day, an editor at GQ, and so has on-the-ground experience of this type of indulgent junket situation. And yet so much of the film wrings false, from the depiction of a print publication that looks like it’s part of the Fortune 500, to the fact that no-one seems at all troubled by this unmediated journey into the unknown to laud the work of an A1 weirdo. (Ariel gets there eventually, but even she’s initially smitten).

Moretti, who is an amalgam of Michael Jackson, Elton John and an ageing Italio-Disco maestro, has surrounded himself by what initially appears to be toadying staff, but they are in fact a bizarre religious cult who engage in tortuous trials to mark their devotion. In a little tent in the middle of the field, a member of the faithful sits and shucks oysters in search of a pearl, hands dripping with blood. It’s all very random and, in terms of its metaphorical intent, extremely strident, and eventually Green struggles to give Moretti an interesting motivation for his big return to the scene.

While a fair majority of the scenes and set-ups lack for deeper resonance, there’s a surface-level sheen that does deliver some superficial thrills. Edebiri is always good value, and she stoically attempts to draw the best out of the material by treating it with grave seriousness. And Malkovich chews the scenery and everything else as the literary diva – though it’s never truly clear if we’re meant to think his music is actually good or merely derivative hackwork that’s completely out of time.