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Opus review: ‘glossy but lacks spine’
Films about journalism can make great thrillers but Mark Anthony Green’s debut requires the audience to suspend more belief than is reasonable
March 14, 2025 17:37
Films about journalism can make great thrillers but Mark Anthony Green’s debut requires the audience to suspend more belief than is reasonable
March 14, 2025 17:37For his debut feature film Mark Anthony Green deploys his experience as an editor at GQ magazine. His heroine is 27-year-old overlooked American magazine staffer Ariel (the excellent Ayo Edebiri) who after three years at the publication has never been given the chance by her editor (Murray Bartlett) to display her talent.
That is until she unexpectedly and inexplicably receives one of a very few invitations extended by Moretti, the (apparently undisputed) world’s greatest-ever rock star, to attend his comeback event since he went dormant around the time Ariel was born. This we gather is like getting a Willy Wonka golden ticket; only Moretti is no Willy.
The role was seemingly written by Green for John Malkovich who accepts the opportunity with his trademark sinister elan. Green might have used his journalistic experience to bring us an inside story about the workings of a publication that considers itself to be an essential mirror to zeitgeist culture. But no. Green is more interested in making a thriller that, in truth, the magazine in his film would give no more than a middling review. Anything more would show an alarming lack of judgment.
This is not to say that films that focus on journalism can’t make great thrillers. I give you All The President’s Men and the recent September 5, set during the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes, as examples of how the theme of journalism can result in gripping cinema.
But here, once the journalists arrive at Moretti’s desert campus we are predictably in homicidal host territory recently explored – and to more thrilling effect – by another debut feature: Blink Twice directed by Zoë Kravitz.
As with Naomi Acke’s character in that movie Edebiri’s Ariel is a sole sceptic while everyone else is too busy enjoying themselves to ask if the ultimate junket is too good to be true.
One of the pitfalls of writing a character who is the Greatest Of All Time at what they do is that they have to be convincingly brilliant
One of the pitfalls of writing a character who is the Greatest Of All Time at what they do is that they have to be convincingly brilliant. But the music we hear from Malkovich’s Moretti is, at best, slightly sub Pet Shop Boys. The audience must suspend more disbelief than is reasonable.
It is a shame because the opening is a beautifully shot sequence of slo-mo close-ups capturing rock fans brought to the moment of ecstasy by their favourite musician. With hair flying and eyes glistening they exude a religious-like devotion. It is a state of mind that justifies the unquestioning loyalty enjoyed by Moretti and his disciples, but which this film leaves unexplored in any meaningful sense.
Green must be kicking himself that Kravitz got there before him and did a better job.
Cert 15
★★★