There’s a long-running joke that those who can’t do, teach. The appropriate analog for the recently released Opus might be that those who can’t make, criticize. The debut film from director Mark Anthony Green invites its audience to explore this long-running tension between artist and critic—with a horrific twist.
Opus offers committed performances by its stars and compelling music by hitmakers Nile Rodgers and The-Dream. Ultimately, it’s hampered by underdeveloped insights—though it’s here that we find intriguing questions for the Christian about whether beautiful and true things need to be defended or whether they can speak for themselves.
The movie centers on legendary pop star Alfred Moretti, played with pitch-perfect weirdness by John Malkovich, who’s resurfaced after a near 30-year absence with the announcement of a new album called Caesar’s Request. In advance of its worldwide release, a handful of invitations to hear the new album go out. One is delivered to journalist Ariel Ecton, played by Ayo Edebiri.
Ariel—and her tagalong, slightly boorish editor—aren’t the only members of this doomed weekend party. Six members of the media—including a paparazzi photographer, radio shock jock, magazine editor, talk show host, and social media influencer—are invited inside a reclusive desert estate. Devotees clad in blue (“Levelists,” named for Alfred Moretti’s philosophy of art making) attend to the guests’ every need as, bit by bit, the new album is unveiled. The guests are closely surveilled, treated to lavish and sometimes bizarre entertainment. Moretti presides, clad in diamond brooches and crushed velvet. Apparently, there’s more to the man than his music.
As in Willy Wonka’s factory, one by one, guests of the wonderland begin to vanish. Through Ariel, we start to learn the place’s secrets. Is this a new cult? Just a deeply devoted fandom? No spoilers here.
What’s clear is that Moretti’s connection to each of these invitees is not random. Each of them belongs to the critic class who have made their living, in part, off lampooning and critiquing him, even as they admire his work. Mocking his baldness or odd behavior, they’ve distracted the public from the substance of his art. Meanwhile, their articles and radio segments are derivative, not offering anything new but riding on the coattails of what he’s already made.
By contrast, the Levelists have found in Moretti not a topic of conversation but a standard bearer. Their devotion, at times painful, isn’t to fame or money or success but to excellence itself. They pursue athletics and sculpture, painting and fine cuisine, even taxidermy, at the highest level. This common commitment to virtuosity binds their community together and ultimately pulls the movie forward toward its violent twist ending.
Long before that end, Opus’s major theme is obvious. Admittedly, it’s a little cliché. The parasitic relationship between critic and artist is one which others long before Green have tackled. The creatives are the great ones, paying humanity’s debt to the universe by producing beauty. Critics, by contrast, get in the way of artists offering their gifts to the world. Critics are pitifully dependent on artists; in one of Opus’s banquet scenes, the guests chew on a common loaf of bread provided by their patron. Their eventual suffering is a repayment for their crimes of judgment.
Great art goes into that world disrespected—but it doesn’t take this disrespect lying down. As Moretti puts it, “Royalty, even at the mercy of peasants, is still royalty.” For him, art making is an act which makes mortals into gods and must be venerated as such.
Here, though, the film seems unsure about how to best honor the art it adores. On the one hand, it implies, great art will find its audience without coercion. Levelists tell story after story of willingly leaving their old lives behind just to be a part of the vision. There are no social media campaigns for Moretti’s work—only the long-haired manager Soledad Yusef (played wonderfully by Tony Hale), who posts adoring rants on YouTube. There are no attempts to make Moretti relatable; at every juncture, he doubles down on the esoteric and arcane.
On the other hand, there’s a fragility to the mythos, one that the Levelists are continually propping up. Despite Moretti’s consistent insistence that he cares only for the art, his bus’s license plate reads CLAP4ME. His acolytes indulge his bad jokes and theatrics with applause. The compound itself is far from inviting, surrounded by miles of desert and barbed wire. There is an undercurrent of needfulness; good art requires not just itself but a captive audience. At the end, it’s evident that beauty cannot be valued in a brutal world without willingness to shed blood.
There are many places for criticism of Opus to land. The script is flat and cliché at times; it follows the well-trodden road of other A24 studio films interested in the relationship between violence and stardom; it frequently leans too heavily on the performances of Malkovich and Edebiri. But one of the places where the film shines is in a tension oddly overlooked by reviews so far: whether there is power in beauty alone or whether it must be supported by force.
Christians have debated this for centuries, wondering whether the holy fools, monastics, and beleaguered small communities—all devoted to sanctity and holiness—were enough. Does not something as grand as the gospel require all the tools we have at our disposal to draw attention to it? Might not we risk making use of the tools of Beelzebub to fight Beelzebub?
In Opus, art represents something like divine power, flashy glory which demands respect. The mysteries of the gospel are also pearls of great price—but they’re buried in a field, lying in wait for us to sell off all we have to obtain them. In both cases, commitment is required; sacrifice is necessary. But when it comes to the gospel, finding the great treasure is its own reward and needs no crowd to honor the gemstones.
In fact, the crowd will likely reject them. Consider ancient Christians who, faced with the demand to surrender their copies of Scripture, chose martyrdom. It was not that the gospel isn’t precious but that there is a right way of honoring great things: giving one’s life, not taking another’s, never resorting to coercion or violence.
Is the very power of God enough to create its own witness apart from compulsion? It’s a concern far more serious than one ambitious but flawed horror film can take up.
Fyodor Dostoevsky said that “beauty saves the world.” By this, he meant that beauty would remind, inspire, and move us to leave behind our pettiness for something greater. Perhaps. But as Opus reminds us, that which is great, true, and beautiful will always have its critics. The question is whether those critics should be loved or destroyed.
Myles Werntz is author of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision for Christian Life Together. He writes at Taking Off and Landing and teaches at Abilene Christian University.
