Ambition is a great thing. It drives us to seek out bigger and bigger things, or even just something new. No one knows that better than Opus protagonist Ariel (Ayo Edebiri), a music writer who can’t get a single pitch through her editor (at least, without him stealing it). That changes when aging pop star Moretti (John Malkovich) plucks her out of obscurity. The music legend is putting out his first album in almost 30 years, and inviting a select few, including Ariel, to be the first to hear it.
Since Opus is social satire, it doesn’t take long for things to get hinky. And yet Ariel is the only one of the invited journalists who seems clear-eyed enough to see through the haze of Moretti’s stardom. Her drive to tell the real story behind the strangeness of Moretti’s followers pushes her to look past the glitz, glamour, and indigo of Moretti’s compound and see something much more foreboding underneath it all. Unfortunately for her, Opus is social-satire horror — so being a driven, underestimated young woman trapped at a cult-y compound is exactly where writer-director Mark Anthony Green wanted her to be.
[Ed. note: This rest of this post contains spoilers for the end of Opus.]
Image: A24
“Ambition has always been celebrated where I’m from, and I have a tremendous amount; I’m sure too much ambition. The thing about ambition that you have to be careful with is, [highly ambitious people] are designed to ignore red flags,” Green told Polygon in an interview ahead of Opus’ release.
This philosophy leads to Opus’ final twist, and the true twist of the knife for Ariel: Two years after her fateful weekend at Moretti’s, she’s written a bestselling book detailing her time on the compound, the deaths of her fellow journalists, and the underpinnings of his cult philosophy. And as she finds out in a final interview with Moretti, now incarcerated, that’s exactly what he hoped for. Moretti took the fall for a bombastic crime and sent his followers out in the world to spread his ideology, with Ariel’s book as the fuel that helps rocket his ideas to household-name status.
Green pulled much of Opus from his time as a music journalist, though he pointedly notes that none of it is directly based on any specific event or person. He worked with Malkovich to make sure Moretti didn’t feel too much like a fictionalized version of any particular pop star. Still, the film’s anxieties are much more global. To Green, tribalism is the poison pill of our times, infecting everyone and everything. That makes Opus delightfully bleak: The film suggests that it doesn’t matter how much you resist joining a tribe. In the end, you’re going to be part of something.
“In all of the research and the study that I did with cults, so many of them target ambitious people, because you’re highly susceptible and vulnerable as an ambitious person,” Green says. Though, he notes, this is not a problem isolated to ambitious people or cults. “I think it’s probably harder now than it ever has been in human history to not get swept up in someone’s agenda.”
To really drive home his point, Green structured the whole movie with his final rug-pull in mind. The movie rests on Ariel’s shoulders, focusing on “what she wants and how she carries herself.” The violence done by Moretti and his followers has a logic to it, but it serves to balance out the “heady” ideas Green wanted to imbue the film with. Ultimately, he always wanted to leave the scenes between Edebiri and Malkovich one beat away from feeling totally clear — even if it felt like “you could make a whole movie” of just the two of them in a room.
“What I felt was most interesting and fresh is the cat-and-mouse of it, to always be one step shy of feeling like, [That’s] completed, or, This person for sure bested that person. And for them to feel like a true sparring match,” Green says. “I think a great end for a film like this is: It should feel satisfying and incomplete.”
