In between The Bear, Ayo Edebiri stays busy, including a trip to Sundance next week for the premiere of Opus, a new comedy(??) horror(???) film from filmmaker Mark Anthony Green and indie tastemaker, A24. The trailer dropped yesterday, and you know me, I love a good horror movie, so I am definitely in.

 

Opus looks like Blink Twice crossed with an article suggesting Jared Leto might have started a cult. Edebiri plays a journalist interviewing a reclusive but aggrandized musician on the cusp of performing after a long hiatus. John Malkovich plays the musician—one of only a handful of people who can play a role like that and seem both funny AND genuinely menacing—and the film also stars Murray Bartlett, Tony Hale, Young Mazino, and Juliette Lewis. It also caught my eye that this films stars Indigenous actors Amber Midthunder and Tatanka Means, which makes me wonder what commentary on celebrities hijacking Indigenous culture and mysticism for their #aesthetic the film might offer.

 

This is Mark Anthony Green’s feature film debut, following his short, Trapeze, U.S.A., and a stint at GQ, so he’s familiar with the world of the celebrity profile. Now that I’m thinking about it, a comedy-horror about a celebrity profile gone awry seems like an obvious setup, especially given the number of bonkers profiles we’ve seen over the years. Not so much lately, it’s true, an increasingly uptight and preventative celebrity management culture pretty well killed the celebrity profile in the 2010s, but if you told me a profile writer ended up escaping a cult indoctrination back in like, the 2000s, I would 100% believe it. 

 

Sundance can be a fickle crowd, you never really know what they’ll bite on and what they’ll skip, especially in more recent years when the festival and its organizers have made a concerted effort to swing back to promoting indie film and not courting Hollywood opinion. Opus will screen as part of the midnight series at the festival, which should be a friendly crowd, and that festival is practically made for Ayo Edebiri and her brand of comedy-driven promotion. I’m very curious to see what the reaction to Opus is out of Park City.