Ayo Edebiri, John Malkovich film a wreck at Sundance

To watch “Opus,” the muddled semi-satire starring Ayo Edebiri and John Malkovich that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is to experience a movie quickly go from promising to punishing.

Authoring the wreck is writer-director Mark Anthony Green, who’s screwed up a usually ironclad story: Unsuspecting pawns get invited by an eccentric rich man on a luxurious getaway only to be caught in its dark underbelly. Home run, right?

After all, that was the set-up for Zoe Kravitz’s infinitely better “Blink Twice” last year and Rian Johnson’s “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” in 2023. Heck, it’s the rough plot of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

Green’s lesser, indulgent, tiresome spin is set around the music industry and the obsessive fandom it inspires. What with Swifties and Little Monsters, his vision is topical in that it’s both relevant and completely surface-level. 

Yet at the beginning, “Opus” appears that it could maybe, possibly be fun.

Glam-rocker Alfred Moretti (John Malkovich) hasn’t released a new album or been seen publicly in 30 years when his agent (Tony Hale) announces a record is finally on the way. The world is abuzz, and stunt-loving Moretti invites a select few journos to jet to his Utah estate and be the first to listen to the hotly anticipated tracks.

This film should be reliably filling as pizza for dinner. But the deliveryman is an hour late and has dropped the box.

Aboard the private plane and four-hour charter bus is Ariel (Edebiri), a driven New York writer who wants to make her name with serious reporting. Edebiri does her dry, cocked-eyebrow shtick, and does it well.

Also along for the ride is her magazine editor Stan (Murray Bartlett), a big talker who’s threatened by Ariel’s talent and has self-centeredly assigned himself to write the story instead. Equally vainglorious is Clara (Juliette Lewis), a tart-tongued TV personality. 

The rest are superfluous. Bill (Mark Sivertsen) has a podcast; Emily (Stephanie Suganami) is a social media influencer; Bianca (Melissa Chambers) stalks celebs as a photographer; and Bingo was his name-o.

Other than Ariel, all of these characters are nursery-rhyme-bland. And I don’t mean in the sense that they lack textured inner lives. The dullards barely have basic traits, so unmemorable they all are.

The group arrives to discover a pop-up town with smiley drones wearing baggy, clay-colored clothes — obviously a cult.  

And who better to lead a brain-washed flock of followers than Malkovich, whose Moretti is stupidly nicknamed “The Wizard of Wiggle.” The actor’s peculiar over-enunciation and theatrical expressiveness are always entertaining and he convincingly sings a few original songs. Moretti’s major hit is called “Dina Simone.” However, his and Edebiri’s skills are wasted by a film that ultimately falls apart.

Discomfort and tension don’t build as we’d expect them to in a thriller. Other than Ariel, the super-fans blithely ignore all the troubling occurrences happening all around them, and the film abruptly ends when their fame-blind naivety leads to a predictable groaner of a finale.  

Moretti’s reasons for asking each individual to come, which are revealed in the last few minutes, are flimsy. A giant “That’s it?!” And then Green rushes in his theses about self-interest — an artist’s ego, a fan’s need for purpose, a tell-all author’s desire to sell books — that hit as hard as a Wiffle ball. 

Despite boasting the terrific star of “The Bear,” “Opus” is a dog.