Seduction by Contradiction

Film poster courtesy of A24.

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…

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