O'Dessa

Bluesky

In the world of movie musicals, the rock opera is a singular phenomenon. By nature exaggerated and overblown, it made sense in the 1970s, when a very particular sense of humour made room for glam and early hair metal to do their thing, but can it still work in the 21st Century? Writer/director Geremy Jasper, who charmed audiences with music-themed indie hit Patti Cake$ back in 2017, is determined to give it his all – but that’s part of the problem.

Screened as part of SXSW 2025, O’Dessa is a Disney production, and one can tell. It’s handsomely produced, colourful and slick, but almost entirely devoid of depth or real emotion – a quality that’s ironic in light of the fact that that’s how its big bad guy, entertainment tycoon Plutonovich (Murray Bartlett) is portrayed. From the outset it feels as if a collection of fantasy and dystopian science fiction archetypes have been poured into a blender and swirled around to produce the script and visuals. There’s a ghost of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice underneath, but the potent atmosphere of that tale is lost, and the narrative unfolds in such a familiar fashion that it never really feels as if anything is at stake.

We follow O’Dessa (Sadie Sink), who, as the opening song informs us, is the child of a rambler whose longing for the road led him to abandon her mother. When he reportedly died, his distinctive guitar was sent back to her, and she buried it in a field. She can’t have been his only love, however, because we are told that our heroine is the seventh son of a seventh son – or close enough to count – which, naturally, gives her a kind of magical power, and ties in to a prophecy we’ve been told about in the prologue. When her mother (whose blend of grief and resentment make her one of the film’s most interesting characters) dies, O’Dessa burns down their house with the body inside – a choice which seems dangerous in light of the mother’s earlier assertion that their land is full of oil, but there you go. She unearths the guitar, says farewell to a bemused-looking llama and hits the road in search of destiny.

In Satylite City, a place whose glaring neon contours make it look like the place every Eighties urban future wanted to be but could not then bring to fruition (or, perhaps, thought better than to try to), she finds it. not straight away, of course. First she finds skullduggery, bitterness and disappointment, as is usual in such tales. She’s just an ordinary farm girl, after all, and not wise in the ways of the world. Stumbling into a sort of mutual rescue with another would-be musical star, glamorously dressed sex worker Euri (Kelvin Harrison Jr), she’s almost as quick to fall into bed with him, and this being a musical, the result is not disease or unplanned pregnancy (so far as we learn) but true love. Now she has something beyond her own ego to fight for.

To be fair to it, the story rattles along at a lively pace and the balance of drama and song is well managed. Both Sink and Harrison Jr are competent when it comes to the acting and singing, if not a great deal more. Whilst the film could do with some star quality to give it a boost (Regina Hall has presence as Euri’s pimp, but is underused), the romance feels real despite the excess of sentiment surrounding it. Both leads are good at conveying a certain kind of wide-eyed innocence.

Although they’re not imaginatively designed – one almost wonders if an AI was involved – the sets work well enough, and Jasper uses them to create something which looks like a stage musical yet still has a cinematic quality about it. A couple of props stand out – it’s a shame that the way one of them behaves at a pivotal moment just looks stupid to anyone with a rudimentary grasp of physics, and the fact that no-one chose to check this obvious problem is indicative of a general failure to pay attention to detail.

The people in the city seem to want something that moves them but don’t know what that is, we’re told, and that feels like an observation that might have been better disregarded. Though the lyrical work is competent, none of the songs are particularly strong, and there’s a general lack of passion in them which thwarts the overall aim. Strong reactions to a generic teenager plus guitar YouTube type number are not believable. The build-up to what is supposed to be a world-changing number at the end inevitably disappoints, as does its conflict-focused context. It is the 21st Century now. Can we not get beyond thunderdome?

“A rambler’s reason for being is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comforted,” O’Dessa’s father tells her. What’s disturbing here is that the film is far too lazily comfortable with itself.