Wealthy eccentrics and their pseudo-cults appear to have replaced haunted houses in our cultural imagination. Any number of genre films now turn on unsuspecting characters receiving coveted invites from charismatic neo-barons to their remote compounds for luxury, decadence, and ornate slaughter or some variation thereof. In the past, they would simply have inherited a decrepit country house and been tormented by ancient souls or demons or whatever.
Now, they indulge fantasies of privilege while slowly discovering that all is not well around them, even as they struggle to let the luxury go. It’s a rather 21st-century human condition. Who needs haunted houses when we’re all surrounded by rich, strange predators? In A24’s new bizarro horror, Opus , the moneyed weirdo is a reclusive legendary pop star named Alfred Moretti, who’s about to release a new album after 27 years.
He’s played by the great John Malkovich, who actually sings several of the songs featured in the picture. This is reason enough to see this film or at least to be intrigued by it. Malkovich never really left his theatricality behind when he broke through into movies in the 1980s; instead, he used it to give many of his characters flamboyance and a slightly insolent, above-it-all quality.
It’s frankly shocking that nobody has asked him to play a pop star until now. Sure enough, he’s the best thing in Opus , seductive and slithery and pathetic and patronizing all at once. Ayo Edebiri plays Ariel Ect.
