Cinema, at its best, does not merely tell stories; it enacts a seduction.
Opus, Writer and Director Mark Anthony Green’s audacious debut, is such a film. The film is a work of high style and sharp teeth, an artifact of the pop cultural excess that it’s complicit in and ruthlessly critical of in its examination. The picture is a thriller, a satire, and a fever dream. Yet, above all, Opus is a film of contradictions: intoxicating yet disgusting, comedic yet horrific, opulent yet lean.
The premise reads like one of Grimms’ fairy tales rewritten for an era of tabloid headlines and algorithmic obsession. Ariel (Ayo Edebiri)—a budding writer of piercing intelligence—is lured to the remote fortress of Moretti (John Malkovich), an aging pop deity who has spent the last 30 years missing, indulged in his own mythology. The mise-en-scène is a battleground of contradictory aesthetics: the grotesque and the glamorous, the ritualized worship of celebrity and the queasy realization that participation is surrender. Ariel is not simply an observer, she is Moretti’s next initiate.
To call Opus a critique of celebrity culture is to reduce it. It does not merely criticize. It embodies, extends, and ultimately deranges the phenomenon. Green has fashioned a film that exposes the mechanisms of its world, forcing the audience to experience them viscerally.
Green understands the paradox at the heart of the project, remarking in a collegiate journalism roundtable interview with the Maroon, “The creative endeavor [is] to make a thriller, but the human in me is just such a smart ass. I can’t not make a joke. There’s a human in me that is just deeply, deeply unserious, that thinks everything is funny, that thinks humor is truly not only the most beautiful weapon, but something more powerful than any other human interaction.”
The film operates within this humanistic dialectic, the tension between horror and humor, between the absurd and the sinister. The whiplash-inducing pacing—frequent moments of grotesque violence cut short by offhand jokes—does not ease the tension as much it sharpens it, paralyzing the viewer in complicit disorientation.
The film’s aesthetic, a collaboration between Green and Director of Photography Tommy Maddox-Upshaw, reinforces this vertigo. The colors are rich and the images grandiose, inviting the audience into a world that welcomes indulgence even as it critiques the very impulse to indulge. The camera does not simply observe Ariel’s journey; it seduces the viewer into it, making us feel as though we are wandering Moretti’s compound alongside her. If Opus is about the spectacle of celebrity, it is itself a spectacle, reveling in the lurid beauty of its own illusions.
Sound plays a similarly crucial role in shaping the film’s intoxicating unease. Green, with characteristic irreverence, describes his sound team’s approach: “I only hired freaks. I’m a firm believer that when you hire freaks, let them get freaky. And so Trevor [Gates] and Casey [Genton], who did the sound on the film; they got freaky. We can always dial it back, but I want your freakiest idea.”
That commitment to excess is evident in the film’s auditory landscape—an original pop score that could easily dominate the Top 50 yet is deployed as ironic counterpoints to the horror unfolding on screen. The sound design is not merely atmospheric; it is psychological, embedding itself into the audience’s nervous system like an anxious defense mechanism.
Underpinning all these technical masterclasses is a deep puzzle, one that Opus does not solve so much as forces the viewer to confront. The film’s dreamlike ambiance invites us into its mystery but never grants us full access, leaving us, like Ariel, wondering whether we are complicit in the spectacle or merely witnessing it. As a former GQ columnist, Green brings his firsthand experience of celebrity culture into the picture. Opus is not just a film about celebrity culture; it is a film that understands such a cancer from the inside out, with all its seductions and violences.
Borrowing from the sensational silk screens of Warhol as much as from the cuttingly critical etchings of Goya, Opus captures a contradiction: a culture drunk off its own excess, celebrating the power of influence despite its inevitable abuse. One does not “like” a film such as Opus. One submits to it. At the end of the film, the audience is left with a question: Do we resist its pull, or do we recognize, in our own enthrallment, the very thing it seeks to expose?
