As targets for satire, flamboyant pop stars and celebrity journalists are low-hanging fruit — maybe even slightly mushy, rotten fruit. But in “Opus,” Mark Anthony Green, a former style columnist for GQ making his first feature as writer and director, bids to say something trenchant about fame while cementing his reputation as a sleek new horror auteur. He comes up short on both counts.
The protagonist is a 27-year-old magazine journalist named Ariel Ecton (Ayo Edebiri), who laments that she hasn’t written anything she considers worthwhile in three years at her job. But there’s big news: The mysterious, reclusive singer Moretti (John Malkovich) — “arguably the biggest pop star of the ’90s,” per Wolf Blitzer, in his obligatory newscast cameo — is coming out of retirement to release his first studio album in roughly the time that Ariel has been alive.
And for unknown reasons, Ariel receives an invitation to Moretti’s desert compound, where she and Stan Sullivan (Murray Bartlett), her highhanded, idea-poaching boss, will join several other V.I.P.s to be the first in the world to hear it.
The other golden-ticket recipients include a TV personality (Juliette Lewis), an influencer (Stephanie Suganami) and a paparazzo (Melissa Chambers). Out of all of them, Ariel is the only one inclined to show any skepticism toward Moretti’s bizarre brand of hospitality, complete with disgusting meal routines (at a banquet, diners pass around and bite from the same, increasingly saliva-saturated roll) and by-your-side “concierge” service, which in effect means that guests are guarded at all times. When Ariel goes for a jog, her minder (Amber Midthunder) even stops and starts at her pace.
Like the upstate home in “Get Out” and the Swedish enclave in “Midsommar,” two movies whose influence looms unflatteringly over the proceedings, Moretti’s compound is a place where something is obviously amiss. Moretti, clearly a leader of some sort of cult, adheres to a religion that preaches a “holistic path” for creative types. There are odd rituals involving pubic grooming, wounds from oyster shucking and a puppet show in which a marionette Billie Holiday is interrogated by anthropomorphic rats.
Green proves a solid filmmaker when it comes to setting atmosphere, and he even shows off the occasional inspired formal touch. (A brawl between two people is shot entirely from behind a closed door; it’s heard but not seen.) And in Edebiri, he has a star who finds a way to keep April’s incredulity fresh.
Everyone around her is playing dumb, though, and “Opus” feels more than a tad broad in its conception of the “wizard of wiggle,” Moretti. (His first name is Alfred, but he performs mononymously.) Bedazzled in gloves, boots and jewels, Malkovich plays him like a combination of Prince, Elton John and, well, John Malkovich, overdoing both the campiness and the menace. Pegging Moretti’s heyday specifically to the 1990s seems off, although it would be hard to make a character like this out of Eddie Vedder. (The would-be hits, which Malkovich sings himself, are by Nile Rodgers and The-Dream.)
Whoever “Opus” is supposed to be sending up, its aim is a bit wide of the mark. But even if the movie’s only real goal is to frighten, it bets far too much on its eventual twists. The explanations for Moretti’s behavior aren’t nearly as diabolical — or original — as Green appears to think. If that’s the film’s upshot, it’s hard to say anything but: How retro.
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