Sundance film festival: The cult of celebrity is targeted in a progressively nonsensical and poorly made debut with too much on its plate

Anyone who has written about a much-loved music star with even the vaguest hint of light criticism will be aware of the horrors that can often follow. The tribal intensity of extremely online and extremely sensitive fandoms can lead to either a mild torrent of more tolerable abuse or something far darker, like death threats and sometimes doxing, an unending rage erupting from people who use emojis as avatars. There’s a great thriller to be made about this unpleasant tension, the fans who will do anything for their idol and the idol who will do nothing to stop them, but Opus, a poppy new A24 misfire premiering at Sundance, is not that movie.

It’s the first film from the writer-director Mark Anthony Green, who, like many before him, is so fixated on what he wants to say that he hasn’t been able to figure out how to say it. There’s maybe a slicker, simpler and more satisfying murder mystery to be told here – an assortment of media types picked off one-by-one at the remote ranch of a reclusive pop star – but he’s challenged himself with something far harder and ultimately too far out of his reach.