Opus follows Ariel Ecton (Ayo Edebiri), a young journalist working at a legacy music magazine. Despite her three-year stint at the publication, Ariel’s ambition is underappreciated, and her smarmy editor Stan (Murray Bartlett) hands her pitches off to more experienced writers. But with Moretti’s VIP invite to his listening party, Ariel gets an unlikely chance to prove her worth. Moretti’s guestlist also includes: Stan—who hogs the story while putting Ariel on note-taking duty—seasoned television host Clara Armstrong (Juliette Lewis), paparazza Bianca Tyson (Melissa Chambers), influencer Emily Katz (Stephanie Suganami), and Bill Lotto (Mark Sivertsen), longtime journalist and Moretti nemesis. As the horror genre requires, we sense that something isn’t quite right upon the group’s arrival in the desert; the compound is staffed by a community of blue-clad cult members called the Levelists, who worship beauty, the artistic process—and Moretti himself. As guests begin vanishing one-by-one, Ariel attempts to uncover Moretti’s ominous plan.
Green wrote Opus during his own tenure in media, as an editor for GQ, where he profiled artists like Donald Glover, the Weeknd, Diplo, and Janelle Monáe. And yet, despite years inside an elite industry, Opus depicts it without much specificity or nuance. The media personnel we meet in the film are less defined than even the most cartoonish gumshoe detective in a B-grade noir. Even Ariel, who has vague ambitions (to interview famous people, to write a book) but no tangible interests, is a flat depiction of a young writer staring down an endangered medium: the glossy music magazine. Fellow critic and compound invitee Bill Lotto, meanwhile, is Moretti’s rival due to a joke he once printed about the singer’s dog. (We learn this via exposition; Lotto hardly utters a word the entire film.)
There was an opportunity for Green to reveal something about the state of pop culture criticism, through the lens of the old and the new guard. Or, to mine the thorny relationships that can arise between press and celebrity subjects. But neither is explored. There are plenty of films set in niche and elite industries that lack definition, but I had hoped Green’s firsthand knowledge of access journalism would get in on the nitty-gritty details, and toss a few punchlines out to all of us still stuck in the grind.
Green presents many symbols of unease that exist without purpose throughout the film. They may masquerade as foreshadowing, but they never pay off with a consequence, or even function as red herrings. Dotted around Moretti’s homestead, monitoring every move of their guests, the Levelists exist only as vessels for cliched creepy behavior. When they’re not practicing archery, painting, or shucking oysters, they brush up on more sinister activities: Discreetly taking measurements of their guests’ bodies; making voodoo dolls in their likenesses; stocking a shed with bloody fur pelts and jars of embalmed critters. When we meet a Levelist for the first time, Green cuts to Ariel’s notebook, where she writes and underlines the words “creepy greeter” in black ink. The whole of Opus’ character development can be summed up in short, scribbled phrases like this.
