Producers: Collin Creighton, Brad Weston, Poppy Hanks, Jelani Johnson, Mark Anthony Green and Josh Bachove   Director: Mark Anthony Green   Screenplay: Mark Anthony Green   Cast: Ayo Edebiri, John Malkovich, Juliette Lewis, Murray Bartlett, Amber Midthunder, Melissa Chambers, Stephanie Suganami, Mark Sivertsen, Tony Hale, Tatanka Means, Aspen Martinez, Peter Diseth and Tamera Tomakili   Distributor: A24

Grade: C-

One can always count on John Malkovich to bring a touch of sinister eccentricity to any role, but in Mark Anthony Green’s “Opus” he’s allowed to go full throttle in that department.  No wonder his character, Alfred Moretti, rattles Ariel Ecton (Ayo Edebiri), the young staffer at a music magazine, when the reclusive pop icon unexpectedly invites her to a momentous event at his remote compound in the Utah desert.

Moretti, you see, is a nineties pop idol who mysteriously stopped performing and disappeared from public view nearly thirty years ago.  Now he’s excited not only his fan base but the whole world by announcing his first new recordings in three decades.  And he’s chosen six people to come hear his creations before anyone else at what amounts to a fabulous launch party.

The other five are important people: talk show star Clara Armstrong (Juliette Lewis), prominent influencer Emily Katz (Stephanie Suganami), infamous paparazzo Bianca Tyson (Melissa Chambers), podcaster Bill Lotto (Mark Sivertsen) and Ariel’s editor Stan Sullivan (Murray Bartlett).  She, on the other hand, is a nobody, Stan’s barely-published lackey.

She’s also the only one of the six who appears nonplussed by the strangeness of the isolated commune where the bus deposits the group after an hours-long drive.  They’re required by Jorg (Peter Diseth), the guy she describes in her handwritten notes as a “creepy greeter,” to surrender their phones for the duration, and the other residents are no less peculiar, from aggressively solicitous Rachel (Tamera Tomakili) to Native American Najee (Tatanka Means).  Even the little girl Maude (Aspen Martinez) who latches onto Ariel is a bit off.

In fact, the place is obviously a cult of Alfred, who has surrounded himself with committed acolytes wearing common garb and plastered-on smiles.  Some are also chosen to serve as personal concierges to the guests, with Belle (Amber Midthunder), Ariel’s, sticking so closely to her, even accompanying her step-for-step on her morning jog, that Ariel is understandably unnerved.

Moretti, on the other hand, dons a variety of outrageous, colorful outfits—including a spaceman suit in which he presents one of his new songs—and shows a special interest in Ariel, even taking her to the shed where the members perform what he describes as their sole ritual—shucking oyster after oyster until they find one with a pearl, the discovery of which gives them high status among their fellows.

The set-up is not an unfamiliar one, with an unsuspecting soul lured to a weird place for some purpose that’s only gradually revealed.  One of the most notable examples of the trope is “The Wicker Man,” but in more recent years Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” gave it a new lease on life, and since that success, it’s served in numerous pictures like “Midsommar” and “Blink Twice.”

The effectiveness of the conceit is determined in each case by how intriguing an ambience a film creates, and how surprising the revelations about the villain’s ultimate aims.  In those respects “Opus” isn’t very high on the list.  Despite Malkovich’s flamboyance, Moretti convinces more readily as an evil cult leader than as a pop music phenomenon (it doesn’t help that the songs we hear from his new album, written by Nile Rodgers and The-Dream, aren’t particularly compelling), and the rather rushed, mostly half-baked explanations for his treatment of his invitees—which extend, via a coda, two years into the future, when Ariel has become a best-selling author—seem either banal (simple revenge) or absurd (increased adulation and influence).

Of the others, Edebiri comes across as genuinely concerned, though her unremittingly sour expression gets tiresome.  The rest are mostly over-the-top, with Lewis especially unrestrained and Midthunder notable for the rare case of underplaying.  Technical credits, from Robert Pyzocha’s production design to Tommy Maddox-Upshaw’s cinematography, are generally adequate, but only Shirley Kurata’s costumes—those for Malkovich, that is—stand out.  The background score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans is suitably unsettling, but Ernie Gilbert’s editing struggles with Green’s pacing, which is pretty sluggish until it abruptly goes into chaotic mode for the finale before going lethargic again in the coda.

Green obviously had ambitious goals here, melding a satire of celebrity culture with a thriller about cults, but in spite of Malkovich and Edebiri, “Opus” doesn’t work particularly well as either.

Producers: Catherine Fitzgerald and Orlando Stewart   Director: James Ashcroft   Screenplay: Eli Kent and James Ashcroft   Cast: John Lithgow, Geoffrey Rush, George Henare, Hilary Joyce, Maaka Pohatu, Paolo Rotondo, Ian Mune, Anapela Polataivao, Fiona Collins, Yvette Parsons and Hannah Lynch   Distributor: IFC Films/Shudder   

Grade: C+

Any film that brings together John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush can’t help but be interesting, and both seem to be having great fun playing off one another in “The Rule of Jenny Pen.”  But sadly, the movie is a psychological thriller that’s unsettling but doesn’t make much sense.     

Director James Ashcroft’s film, like his last “Coming Home in the Dark” (2021), is based on a short story by New Zealand author Owen Marshall and was co-written by Eli Kent.  It’s sort of a gender-reversal version of “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” set at a senior care home called Royal Pine Mews.

Rush’s Stefan Mortensen is a new arrival there, a stern judge who, we see in a prologue, has suffered a stroke while sentencing a child abuser and berating the mother of the victim for letting it happen.  Now confined to a wheelchair, he insists to the staff that he intends to recover and return to his normal life, but their prognosis is not good.

Mortensen is not a terribly likable person; he’s arrogant, sharp-tongued and intolerant of his roommate Tony Garfield (George Henare), a former rugby player whose leg injury left him with a limp.  But he’s not so insensitive as to react with indifference when a fellow resident (Ian Mune), an old fellow who refuses to give up his habit of smoking and drinking simultaneously, accidentally self-immolates on the backyard patio to which Stefan has retreated for some fresh air.

Still, despite his condescending attitude, Stefan might have found the home tolerable but for the presence of Dave Crealy (Lithgow), a long-time resident (and, as the judge will learn from a wall full of photos, a former staff member).  Crealy wears on his left hand Jenny Penn, a bald baby doll from which the eyes have been removed.  Jenny might have originated as a therapy doll for Crealy, but he’s turned her into an instrument of terror that he wields against other residents, forcing them to admit that she rules the place and to perform humiliating obeisance to her.  Poor, submissive Garfield is a constant target.  Stefan will become another—for reasons that Crealy, in a monologue late in the film, suggests.

The mistreatment of the two roommates is hardly the worst thing that their sadistic tormentor is responsible for, however.  He’s actually responsible for the death of Eunice Joyce (Hilary Norris), an elderly woman suffering from dementia whose delusion that her family is coming to take her home he takes advantage of in a particularly awful way.  True, his panic at being discovered in the aftermath indicates that beneath the cruelty he’s riddled with fear, and his desperation to cover his tracks leads to one of the film’s most excited sequences.  But the staff’s indifference to Stefan’s complaints about him, and their genial acceptance of his doll, indicate that he doesn’t have much to worry about.  (So does their absence during his nocturnal ramblings about the place.)  Indeed, the only creature that seems to take much notice is the resident cat Pluto (played by a feline named Marbles).         

In due course the judge proves as ruthless as Crealy in his own way.  Noticing that Crealy’s severely asthmatic, he crafts an opportunity to take advantage of his medical needs.  And in the end he seeks to enlist his reluctant roommate to seek a revenge that’s as ghastly as anything Crealy has done. 

“Jenny Pen” gets no points for plausibility, but in the hands of Ashcroft and his technical team—production designer Zahra Archer Monogue, cinematographer Matt Henley and editor Gretchen Peterson—along with the moody score by John Gibson, it creates a mood of quiet dread that the stars sink their teeth, or dentures, into.  Rush sneers and harrumphs with Dickensian glee, while also eliciting sympathy as the increasingly helpless Mortensen suffers at Crealy’s hand.  And while Lithgow has gleefully played outrageous villains in the past—just think of “Blow Out,” “Cliffhanger” and “Ricochet,” to name a few—he’s never been better at the task than here, exuding menace that periodically breaks out into hysterical floor shows in the commons room.

For all the pleasure one might help in watching Lithgow and Rush chew up the scenery, though, the fact remains that the menu is inferior.  As far as Grand Guignol goes, Davis and Crawford had it better.