Ayo Edebiri is no stranger to making people laugh. Whether that's in comedies that err more on the side of drama with hit show The Bear or sillier, slapstick humor like the queer high school movie Bottoms, Edebiri has made her name as a comedic actor. With new thriller Opus, however, she proves that she can work with darker material too – and would kill it (no pun intended) as a horror flick's final girl.
The directorial debut from former GQ editor Mark Anthony Green follows underappreciated junior journalist Ariel Ecton (Edebiri), who's inexplicably invited to join a select group of legacy media stalwarts – and a token influencer – on a weekend retreat to get an exclusive first listen of reclusive pop legend Alfred Moretti's (John Malkovich) comeback album at the musician's remote compound. Missing from public life for the past couple of decades, Moretti has set up camp with a bunch of mysterious cultists, and things go from weird to weirder as the excursion progresses.
Cult classic
Moretti's guests are required to hand over their phones on arrival, for example, and there are some uncomfortable personal grooming requests for invitees. Each guest is assigned their own butler, but it soon becomes apparent that they take their job very seriously and won't leave their sides – literally. And then a member of their party goes missing…
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Opus is by no means a horror movie, but there are plenty of horrifying moments that let Edebiri showcase a different side of her acting abilities. Ariel is the first one to notice that something isn't quite right in Moretti's compound, and her search for answers leads her into more and more unsettling territory.
In one particularly troubling scene, Moretti takes Ariel to a hut where a cult member sits shucking hundreds of oysters, looking for the pearls that the group use to decorate the necklaces they all wear. As he searches to no avail, growing increasingly manic, he slices into one of his hands, and Moretti ushers Ariel away. A puppet show put on by the children of the cult for Moretti's guests, with freakily realistic puppets, is probably the closest the movie veers to horror territory, although these marionettes don't come to life.
Final destination
Another unsettling moment involves the journalists listening to Moretti's new album for the first time. It's at once sexualised, goofy, and menacing, as the pop star lunges and gyrates in a performance that the (predominantly female) audience doesn't seem to know how to interpret. Should they be entertained or uncomfortable? In Moretti's eyes, probably both. There's no sexual violence in Opus, but an undercurrent of gendered power is a stalwart of the horror genre.
The film features its fair share of bloody violence, too, and there are a few scenes that dabble in action territory, in which Ariel must fight off aggressors. Edebiri perfectly conveys a dogged sense of survival in Ariel, a gritty determination to survive and get out of this situation by any means necessary – a vital quality for any final girl.
The villain of Opus may not be a mythical monster, but Moretti is a looming specter haunting the movie all the same, and Ariel's fight for survival proves that Edebiri has what it takes to face off against something that goes bump in the night. If any horror directors are looking for their next scream queen, they know where to look.
Opus is out now in cinemas. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.
