Never has the term “instant cult classic” felt so apt.
Sometimes a movie knocks you out with its audacity. The pure sheer of will to exist, to be something honest and true in the world. That audacity unfortunately does not always align with capacity. You can have all the wild ambition in the world, mixed with best intentions, and the end result can be mired by your eyeline not quite meeting the horizon. And there is a different kind of beauty to that. O’Dessa, the new folk-rock dystopian musical from Geremy Jasper, is such an object.
O’Dessa has all the subtlety of a bag of sledgehammers, a giant day-glow tribute to righteous anger at the current state of the world. It is in terms knowingly silly but also painfully earnest, a big bleeding heart movie about how the forces of love are big enough to smash authoritarianism. It’s attempting to create a large-scale world for you to get lost in, but then fills with a shallow, thuddingly obvious mythos that also rewinds and repeats itself over and over and over again. Themes that are sung in one scene are spoken plainly in another. I suspect Jasper, who directed, wrote and composed for the movie, is meaning to create echoing themes, but the impact sometimes is that it feels like he forgot he already said something in the edit.
Set against a post-apocalypse straight from mid 90s graphic design, O’Dessa unfolds the fairy tale journey of the titular character, played with all her effort and pouty eyes by Sadie Sink. Born on a depleted oil farm that feeds a distant metropolis, O’Dessa has since childhood know of her destiny. Her father, the last of the Ramblers (think folk singing drifter Jedis), told her that one day she would take up her family’s mantle and defeat the evil forces of the world. Specifically the world has been over taken by Plutonovich (Murray Bartlett, understanding the assignment), a fascist dictator who uses endless streams of reality television punishment and public humiliation to keep the downtrodden public in line.
As O’Dessa explores deeper into the hell of Satelyte City, she discovers songbird and sex worker Euri (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and quickly falls in love. Together they take on limits of Plutonovich’s power, always punctuated with acoustic folk songs and rallying cries.
For those classics scholars, you may notice the source material Jasper is pulling from her, riffing of a gender-swapped Orpheus and Eurydice into low-tech sci-fi tropes. But the tone is more akin to cinematic genre fables such as Star Wars or Wizard of Oz. O’Dessa’s daring journey into hell can often feel sluggish, but also never quite picaresque enough to find discernable segments. Rather it moves in starts and stops, and mostly sings it way between increasingly repetitive lore dumps. For long stretches of the film, characters both speak and sing in almost exclusively exposition, making sure you know the parameters of the world.
The musical segments are the strongest parts of O’Dessa, lifted by a talented cast of musicians and singers, and Jasper’s grasp on creating emotionally gratifying and fulfilling musical segments is a nice carry over from his debut film, Patti Cake$. But while that film benefitted from having a simple, humanistic core of relational drama and comedy, O’Dessa’s sprawling mythology doesn’t often play to Jasper’s strengths. He clearly has ambitions for a quirky mythological update, and his aesthetic choices evoke the most radical 90s, Millennial-coded end times.
The problem is his stylistic touch doesn’t quite add up to an emotional depth. Another clear reference point for Jasper is the Mad Max films, but George Miller traditionally knew to always allow the viewer to fill in the emotional margins. By contrast, Jasper fills the entire frame, finding subtext to be a detriment to the totemic mythology. So for all the appealing visual flash and a soundtrack that is loaded with effective earwormy folk rock, O’Dessa never quite trusts its audience to “get it”, and instead insists and insists and jams elbows in the ribs constantly to make sure they get it. By the time it reaches its genuinely cathartic conclusion, the viewer is completely outside the work itself, appreciating it for craft and camp. It’s the kind of thing that screams “cult classic”, and will likely have people who lock into its admittedly winning vibe, especially those that enjoy it’s nonconformist gender fluidity. But as a piece of pop culture myth making, it just falls short of the ambitions of the things it is trying to stand beside.
