Everyone who dunked on Jacques Audiard for taking a big swing with Emilia Pérez should eat crow after seeing O’Dessa. This rock opera proves that there’s a huge difference between a big swing and a big swing and a miss. O’Dessa is not so much a swing and miss, but a case of the batter cranking up to hit that ball so hard that he flings the bat into the face of an unsuspecting fan in the bleachers without scoring a single base. That’s a lot of pain for a foul ball. But getting a concussion is surely less painful than watching O’Dessa.
This operatic mess imagines a dystopian wasteland where steampunk reigns, but everyone remains fully electric. One glimmer of acoustic hope shines in the neon wasteland, however. The titular troubadour O’Dessa (Sadie Sink) strums on the outskirts of Satylite City. Her guitar is her prized possession. She carries it proudly as the only relic left of her family’s legacy, except, of course, her voice. She inherited that instrument, like the guitar, from her daddy. O’Dessa’s late father figure guides her like the guardian angel version of Johnny Cash.
However, when some ruffians steal her guitar and the heirloom lands in a pawn shop, O’Dessa vows to win it back. Things get really complicated from here: barely ten minutes in.
Satylite City finds itself governed by a sort of TV overlord. That guy, Plutonovich (The White Lotus’s Murray Bartlett) lives on an island modelled on the Emerald City. He plays Wizard on a nightly show that crosses The Hunger Games with American Idol and—somehow?—guides the fate of everyone in the city who tunes in with joyful hope that they’ll be saved by a Muad’dib figure blasting Plutonovich to high heavens with some sweet tunes. But really, Timothée Chalamet just did both those movies and O’Dessa makes less sense than a mash-up supercut of Dune: Part Two and A Complete Unknown with a dash of Emilia Pérez’s thrown into the cinematic blender.
It’s as bad as it sounds. Even the film’s 19-page press book leaves one totally muddled. There’s also a storyline with O’Dessa’s hunky-but-clearly-gay boyfriend (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) and the crippled mob boss who controls him at—I think?—Plutonovich’s command. Because why not?
One can try to appreciate the flex that director/writer/composer Geremy Jasper (Patty Cakes) tries to make here. O’Dessa marks an ambitious gambit, if a spectacularly splashy bellyflop. The film looks great with a canvas of neon lights. Funky costumes and sets offer an impressive effort at world building. But when the story makes no sense, and the music itself, frankly, stinks, then all the dressings in the world can’t save it. It is, after all, a musical.
Sink (The Whale) offers a compelling lead with her deep expressive eyes and respectable vocals. However, O’Dessa’s waif-like crooning seems ill-suited for the balls-to-wall dystopia that Jasper envisions. This world calls for bombast and energy—think of that propulsive Junkie XL score in Mad Max: Fury Road—but O’Dessa serves anemic Joni Mitchell plucking. Sure, acoustic ditties probably make more sense in a world that’s gone to shit, but the lights are still on in this plugged-in wasteland. The sound of O’Dessa doesn’t jive with the image. If the acoustic nature serves as prophetic salvation— lyrics about a “seventh son” drive the climax—O’Dessa doesn’t articulate itself through the cacophony.
For a musical, O’Dessa probably works best with the sound off, as some sort of diversion while folding laundry. But that comment seems unfair to the laundry.
