From the opening scene, it was clear Opus would live down to its overinflated name. The word opus implies a masterwork, this film delivers the opposite: a scattered, bloated mess trying desperately to mean something.
Written and directed by Mark Anthony Green, whose résumé includes being a GQ Magazine writer and podcaster, his only previous directing credit is a short film titled Trapeze, USA. So naturally, someone handed him $10 million to make this incoherent, self-important attempt at suspense-horror. That figure probably doesn’t even include marketing.
The real mystery? How this script, riddled with plot holes and intellectual posturing got greenlit. Did John Malkovich and Juliette Lewis, both Oscar nominees, lose a bet? Or were they just cashing a check?
Malkovich, miscast as an aging rockstar releasing a long-awaited album, seems to sleepwalk through the role. No depth, no tension, no reality. Just a hollow performance in a hollow film. As for Ayo Edebiri, who plays lead character Ariel, I watched to see what she’d do outside The Bear. Sadly, she delivers a near-identical performance, offering no new dimension.
The plot, if you can call it that: The rockstar invites a curated group of people to his compound to hear his new album. Upon arrival, their phones and laptops are confiscated. Soon after, guests begin dying, apparently so Ariel can write a book about it. Why? Something about how society moved from leaders of brute strength to Ivy League credentialed manipulators. Then it spirals into a lecture on junk media, divide-and-conquer propaganda, and the collapse of cultural standards.
There could have been a story here. But instead, we get a confused mix of pseudo-intellectual ramblings and wannabe social commentary buried in a film with zero emotional investment.
And a Sundance Official Selection 2015? They sold out decades ago to the same people that would give them the time of day. A place for young artists to showcase their talent.
Opus is less a work of art and more an expensive vanity project dressed in philosophical $10,000,000.00 mumble.
A generation of women were told decades ago, “You can have it all” by feminist leaders.
They could have,
Career.
Children.
Independence.
Sexual liberation.
Happiness.
World travel and romance.
Brunch with bottomless mimosas and the meaning to life.
Gloria Steinem handed out empowerment advice like candy, and Ms. Magazine practically yelled from the rooftops:
“You don’t need a man, you need ambition!”
Six-figure jobs, one bedroom apartments with no natural light, a cat named Simone de Beauvoir, a tiny dog in a bag named Luna and a therapist on speed dial.
These daughters of ambition, traded their pumps for sneakers to climb the corporate ladder, dodging monogamy like it was gluten and turned “self-care” into a full-time job.
Prophetess, preaching the gospel from the altar of Ms, Sojourner, Sinister Wisdom, Heresies, and other men hating magazines dressed in liberation for their younger counterparts looking to brainwash the recruits.
Consistently bashing the patriarchy, saying they could do it better, not realizing the irony due to most of the modern conveniences they enjoy, even their maxi-pads were created by men. They also benefited from the education system which was created by the same people they loathe.
And yet, here they stand and protest, on streets they haven’t paved and bridges they didn’t build. They flush toilets they didn’t engineer, posting selfies and anti-men rhetoric from satellites launched by the very minds they now scorn.
But now, mid-40s, two houseplants dead and many relationships ghosted, they’re sitting in traffic on the way to their hot yoga class asking themselves…
“Is this all there is?”
Because somehow, “liberation” started to become the same as exhaustion.
She were promised freedom. A freedom found in a romance novel.
What she got was the privilege of paying rent in the echo of her own footsteps and assembling IKEA furniture alone with a bottle of Chardonnay.
And having a panic attack in aisle 5 at Target…legs shaking, alone with her service animal.
Always ready for a fight, arguing about a dollar overcharge or an unspoken word, as she’s looking to release frustration of broken promises from empowerment slogans she said over and over while marching in lock step.
Now, she knows how men have felt for decades.
Overworked.
Overstimulated.
Underappreciated.
And quietly wondering…
Is this all there is?
“Am I just… a resource?”
Congratulations, they now have his salary, but also…
his stress level,
his cholesterol,
his health issues,
his spousal payments,
and surprise, his dreaded existence.
She got everything she asked for as reality has set in.
And somehow…
She still feel like something’s missing.
Maybe fulfillment wasn’t hiding in a job title and it’s large salary.
Maybe it wasn’t in the yoga retreat in Sedona.
Maybe it wasn’t in the third Master’s degree or the yearly retreat to wine country.
Maybe it was in the things she rolled her eyes at and told to avoid by a feminist mentor.
Family.
Connection.
Faith.
Quiet.
Commitment,
But hey, don’t worry.
There’s a podcast to help.
A YouTube life coach who swears it gets better after the planet Saturn finally stops clashing with Mercury’s retrograde.
Just keep swiping on TikTok for answers you refuse to implement.
And in the end, it wasn’t feminism that failed.
It was the leap into the unknown, with certainty where there should have been humility, conviction before comprehension.
The belief that she understood, before she ever truly knew what it was she were stepping into.
The fine print and warning label on modern life, that one needs reader spectacles to see.
That small line at the bottom of the ad that said:
“Happiness sold separately.”
So here we are.
Tapped out.
Disgruntled.
Divorced.
At odds,
but side by side.
Burned out.
In the drive-thru at Starbucks.
Alone.
Forgetting what it was all about and wondering the same damn thing:
In today’s attention-deficient culture, we’ve even lost the tolerance for waiting to be entertained.
A moment of silence? It’s met with anxiety.
We no longer sit with silence, we scroll through it.
We scroll through dopamine hits like junkies in denial, calling it “productivity” when it’s just well-disguised panic.
Multitasking the multitask.
One screen isn’t enough; the TV murmurs in the background while we thumb through a phone, while a podcast is playing on the computer, playing different distractions, neither truly seen.
We are addicted to the flicker, not the substance.
To be still is to be uncomfortable. To focus on a single thought, has become unbearable.
When the world falls apart before your eyes, the pillars you once deemed immortal marble monuments of certainty begin to fracture.
A fissure within the fissure, like rot beneath polished wood, spreads without sound, a quiet mutiny against the illusion of permanence.
What was fortress was façade.
What was strength was scaffolding painted like stone.
And the cracks, they don’t destroy, they reveal. They unveil the cancer veiled in pride, growing in shadows, fed by neglect and dressed as tradition.
But though the mask is torn, it is not too late.
Even as temples tumble and the gods of comfort fall, there is time to wield the blade, cut away the rot, and build again, not from illusion, but from truth.
A rotting onion, buried deep, will split, decay, and reach for the sun once again.
A glimpse of Heaven is lying in bed on a warm, golden morning, when a cool breeze drifts in through the half-open window, carrying the rich, smoky perfume of bacon cooking in your neighbor’s kitchen.
War didn’t just take lives, it shattered the emotional and structural fabric of the family.
We taught men how to survive the battlefield, but never how to return to life when they got back home.
They came back with medals and nightmares, with silence in their mouths and fire buried in their chests. Fathers in body, bipolar in spirit.
And what do you think that did to the children and the wives?
To the sons watching a man who could fix a car but couldn’t fix his own disorder.
The nuclear family wasn’t blown apart overnight.
It was dismantled, brick by brick, word by word, until all that remained were broken homes, people and blurred roles.
Masculinity was recast as a disease, fatherhood as disposable.
Men were told they were toxic, not by warriors, but by limp-wristed men and angry, bitter confused women, who consistently discredit the patriarchy.
And from that collapse, a void opened.
Where once there was guidance, now there’s guesswork.
Where once there were fathers, now there are phone screens.
We replaced discipline with diagnosis, taking responsibility with victim mentality, purpose with distraction, commitment with what ever feels good and truth with trend.
And so boys drift. They scroll. They vape, escape via drugs and then they vanish.
They lose themselves in violence, social media, pornography, pills, and pixels.
They chase status without meaning, and freedom without direction.
This isn’t liberation.
This is abandonment with a fresh coat of paint.
We stripped them of their roots and offered no replacement. We mocked tradition, then cried when they stopped showing up.
They weren’t raised. They came home to an empty house. They were left to figure it out in a culture that can’t even agree on what a man is.
And still, we ask why.
Why are they angry?
Why are they numb?
Why are they violent, addicted, or gone?
Because the world they were born into told them they were a problem before they ever had a chance to be a solution.
So here we are, generations deep into a slow unraveling, with too many young men lost in the void of structure.
But it doesn’t have to stay this way.
Because a man who remembers who he is, what he comes from, what he’s capable of, can become the very structure that was missing.
He can stand tall, even if he was never taught how.
He can speak truth, even if no one ever spoke it to him.
He can father the future, even if he was never fathered right.
This is the time to build again.
Not just buildings. Not just brands. But men. Real men. Humble. Grounded. Gentle. Strong enough to carry weight, and wise enough to know when to put it down.
Chu The Cud 