This review was originally published on January 28, 2025, out of the Sundance Film Festival. We are recirculating it now timed to Opus’s theatrical release.
Wealthy eccentrics and their pseudo-cults appear to have replaced haunted houses in our cultural imagination. Any number of genre films now turn on unsuspecting characters receiving coveted invites from charismatic neo-barons to their remote compounds for luxury, decadence, and ornate slaughter or some variation thereof. In the past, they would simply have inherited a decrepit country house and been tormented by ancient souls or demons or whatever. Now, they indulge fantasies of privilege while slowly discovering that all is not well around them, even as they struggle to let the luxury go. It’s a rather 21st-century human condition. Who needs…
