Summary
A visually dazzling rock opera with big ideas, but one that never quite finds its rhythm.
There’s no mistaking director Geremy Jasper’s intent as a psychedelic storm of logos gives way to a throwback set of ’80s-inspired titles and a sweeping purple landscape. O’DESSA is a dystopian rock opera, blending aesthetics that range from 2000 AD to Liquid Sky. So when the first of many folk-country ballads begins, the tonal whiplash is immediate.
Jasper’s script layers in a multitude of monomythic elements, but at its core, it follows the titular O’Dessa (Sadie Sink), the last in a long line of guitar-totin’ troubadours called ramblers. We know this because the first three or four songs are all about ramblin’. It is prophesied that she, as the Seventh Son, will bring an end to the machinations of Plutonovich (Murray Bartlett), who controls Onderworld through mind control embedded in a game show called The One.
So, following the death of her dirt-farmer mother, this rambler gets ramblin’ toward Satylite City, armed only with a guitar. Along the way, she encounters Euri Dervish (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a gender-fluid performer who is equal parts Prince, the Biblical Salome, and Lil Nas X. They almost immediately fall hopelessly in love, but fate has other ideas. To save the soul of her star-crossed lover, O’Dessa must face her destiny.
Jasper, who previously directed the comparatively lo-fi Patti Cake$, certainly takes a big swing with O’DESSA. Held together by the loose fibres of a broader mythology, the film has the moment-to-moment logic of a music video, confronting its hero with a mix of cultural influences, bright neon, and LED stripping. This is particularly effective when O’Dessa first enters the big city, the screen enveloped in a perpetual red glow.
At times, the shopfront is The Illuminatus! Trilogy, with an all-seeing eye and looming monoliths dominating the landscape. Elsewhere, a computerized ’80s grid and a tortured version of Max Headroom serve as totemic symbols of oppression. During Feelin’ Free, the most joyful number in the piece, a horn section blending Eastern and Western aesthetics injects a liveliness into all the oppressive darkness.
It’s just that Jasper never quite brings all these elements together successfully. If this is The Wizard of Oz, then it never follows a straight line down the yellow brick road. His version of a Kansas farm girl has her equivalent of the ruby slippers in the form of a musical inheritance, but it’s hard to tell whether the film’s final acts of rebellion reveal the man behind the curtain or if Dorothy simply surrenders.
It’s almost fitting that this arrives around the same time as The Electric State, a film with ten times the budget but a similarly thin exploration of rebellion against technological dependence. Neither quite gets beyond the surface, but at least Jasper’s looks gorgeous while trying.
2025 | USA | DIRECTOR: Geremy Jasper | WRITER: Geremy Jasper | CAST: Sadie Sink, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Murray Bartlett, Regina Hall | DISTRIBUTOR: Searchlight Pictures/Hulu | RUNNING TIME: 106 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 20 March 2025 (Hulu/Disney+)
