‘Opus’: Another Eat-the-Rich Horror Film that Falls Flat

This week, I invited a movie-buff friend to see Opus (2025), which was touted as a ‘horror-musical’. He declined, stating, ‘It’s been attempted, but never pulled off.’ He was right: the film – in which rookie reporter Ariel Ecton (Ayo Edebiri) is invited to the remote compound of an aging pop icon – was neither scary nor especially musical. In an early scene, Ecton laments the slow progress of her climb from celebrity profiler to outright celebrity. Her friend retorts that no one cares about her opinion because she’s too average, too ‘mid’. This is ironic, since Edebiri herself is something of a sensation in taste-making circles, owing to her performance as a chef in the haute-cuisine series The Bear (2022–ongoing).

In Opus, she plays a variant on that affable nerd, and she is an effective guide into the realm of hype-culture ‘journalism’ and the rarefied retreats of the one percent. Here, that frame is populated by a familiar cast doing what they do: John Malkovich is blowhard auteur Alfred Moretti (part Liberace, part Michael Jackson); a hirsute Tony Hale is the louche agent Soledad Yusef; Amber Midthunder is the comically menacing minder Belle; and Juliette Lewis is, yes, a glamorous woman called Clara Armstrong embroiled in cultish behaviour. It’s all very meta, you see.

Once Ecton receives her ticket to the exclusive unveiling of Moretti’s first record in decades, the rest of the story could have been written by AI: private planes, confiscated phones, desert-chic accommodations, things not being what they seem, violence, a predictable plot twist. Opus is worth watching for the acting and the barbed Easter eggs (especially for New York or LA media types, at whom much of the gallows humour is directed). Beautifully shot, the film sustains a vaguely aspirational tone, somewhere between the curdled resort tourism of The White Lotus (2021–ongoing) and the deadpan opportunism of The Curse (2023). It’s the sort of movie you’d be glad to watch on an airplane. But, didn’t we already see this one before when it was called The Menu (2022) or Glass Onion (2022) or Blink Twice (2024)? Maybe that’s the horrifying part: that we are so awash in this sort of elevated, eat-the-rich satire that even lavishly produced versions feel like schlock.

The feeling one gets when watching Opus is akin to the sense of over-served ennui that is foregrounded in many of those other projects. We’ve been fed a diet of prestige storytelling, and many of its hallmarks are now predictable. Such saturation is synonymous with the rise of A24, Opus’s New York production company, founded in 2012. Over the past decade, A24 has collaborated with a murderers’ row of young directors to produce dozens of acclaimed films, in the process creating a now-dominant aesthetic. 

Sometimes, A24 makes way for the winsome Bildungsroman or the stern allegory; more typically, their films blend high finish with the tropes of popular modes, such as slasher, heist or road-trip pictures. In short, they made horror movies tasteful, a cinematic equivalent of everyone in Brooklyn deciding Dungeons & Dragons is cool. Along the same timeline, in the hands of directors like Kitty Green or Jordan Peele, the genre was elevated further still – no longer fantasy, or even allegory, but a mirror held up to the terrifying dimensions of countless peoples’ actual lives.

Opus duly gestures toward critique – of celebrity worship, say, or performative travel or limitless consumerism – but its target remains elusive. All the pieces are there, from the film’s southwestern, new-age setting to the sharply dressed cultists to the sexually inappropriate men in charge. The score is angular and chimey, the mood effervescent until it takes a darker turn. If you squint, you can probably find a ‘commentary’ about this or that, but it’s all allusion in search of bite. It’s not hard to imagine how much more enjoyable, and arguably more trenchant, a multiverse version of Opus might have been, in which Will Farrell played Moretti, and the narrative told in the more antic tones of a Talladega Nights (2006).

This is how satire becomes farce. The risk of horror’s migration to the cultivated ‘mid-stream’ is that it abandons the abjection which long made it powerful. More purist versions of the genre – long viewed as a ‘low’ form – tend to reflect social forces through their distasteful excess, by taking things to their visceral edge. Or there’s the cross-over into other modes of subversive taste, such as camp. As my wary friend later relented, the only successful horror-musical mash-up was the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), a theatrical flop and staple of the midnight revival circuit. Opus, meanwhile, aspires to be the kind of movie Ecton might write about for a hip magazine. That in itself is meaningful: if a decade’s shlock is a barometer for the mood of a society’s broad middle, horror’s ubiquity augurs something actually scary: even the normies are stalked by anxiety without end.