Yahoo Lifestyle ‘O’Dessa’ Review: Sadie Sink Finds a Few Grace Notes in an Otherwise Discordant Rock Opera
There are a handful of title cards to explain the fantastical world in which “O’Dessa” takes place, but perhaps it would be more instructive if there were a few more to lead audiences back to a time before the acquisition of Fox by Disney, when Geremy Jasper’s ambitious rock opera first started to be developed at Searchlight with great enthusiasm in the wake of the director’s Sundance hit “Patti Cakes.” Now shredded into ribbons, the story of a girl (Sadie Sink) and her guitar feels like the end product of various executive regimes that couldn’t agree on a single vision, ultimately settling on the simplest of stories inside an ornate setting that’s been rendered largely incomprehensible by studio notes.
“O’Dessa” envisions the end of civilization, but when it debuts on Hulu a week after its premiere at SXSW, it’ll seem like the end of a certain era for its studio, where the project was hatched by alumni of “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” Call it a relic of a time when Searchlight invested in second features from filmmakers whose bold debuts they’d acquired in Park City during the mid-2010s. It was an admirable enough plan, though few of those sophomore efforts amounted to much: “Beasts” director Benh Zeitlin’s follow-up “Wendy” barely registered, while another blazingly original pair, “Sound of My Voice” masterminds Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling, turning their attention to television after “The East.”
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It’s incredible that “O’Dessa,” which features more than a dozen original songs and Regina Hall as a villain, was greenlit in the first place. (For her part, sporting electrified brass knuckles and no eyebrows, Hall deserves better than the screen time allowed.) But disappointment sets in when it’s clear at some point between conception and completion, Jasper was most likely asked to simply play the hits.
The slender thread that holds the overstuffed film together has a similar logline to “Patti Cakes,” as a young woman uncertain of her voice connects with a fellow outsider (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and finds the power inside herself. And yet, while Danielle MacDonald had to refine her rap game in the familiar environs of New Jersey, there is nothing relatable at all about Satylite City, the dilapidated dump that is supposedly one of the last bastions of life on earth, where O’Dessa heads to fulfill her fate as the daughter of a rambler, a certain type of musician that’s fallen out of favor.
Between the country garb worn by her late father in O’Dessa’s visions and the Buddy Holly rockabilly look she adopts, there’s a certain assumption of what that musical tradition actually is, but it’s upended by the variety of musical styles that she ultimately plays, which veer more toward rock and pop, adding to the confusion around what she stands for as she starts to be seen as a voice of liberation for the masses.
“O’Dessa” doesn’t lack for energy as one musical sequence surges into another with pompadoured Sink really holding her own, but little of it makes sense. O’Dessa and Harrison’s Euri fall in love with each other because they’re expected to, but have only moments to do so on the film’s frantic timeline. Meanwhile, O’Dessa is obliged to participate in a variety show called “The One” when Euri is taken prisoner by its host, the all-powerful Plutonovich (Murray Bartlett), for publicly taking his name in vain. Likely conceived at a time when “American Idol” ruled the airwaves and a reality TV star was about to be made president of the U.S., there is some logic for why Plutonovich is considered a god in this world, but the film never makes a strong argument for it beyond being beamed into everyone’s home.
There’s too much passion and creativity on display to declare “O’Dessa” a complete catastrophe, but the committed performances and detailed production design and costumes all come across as the product of bibles’ worth of backstory that couldn’t possibly be carried over with the constraints of time. It’s still a shame that the film is bound to get lost on a streamer when Jasper has made something that in its most rousing moments can play to the rafters, yet its best chance at a legacy is likely in being chopped up into TikTok clips and shared by Sink and Harrison fans, where its audacity can be appreciated without much other context needed.
Fittingly for her final performance on “The One,” Plutonovich makes things difficult for O’Dessa by cutting the strings on her guitar to just one. Too often it seems as if “O’Dessa” the film is striking the same note.
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