Curiosity Inc.

And I thought 2024 was a bad year for movies.

Granted, the first couple months of the year are typically the slowest, and it’s not like the past few months have been completely void of good cinema. (Seriously, that Novocaine/Black Bag/The Day the Earth Blew Up weekend was serendipity like nothing we deserved.) But regardless of whether it’s shit or gold on the screens right now, box office dollars are down across the board. It’s outright depressing to be a movie geek right now.

So this time, I decided to try something I haven’t done in a while and load up a streaming release that looked interesting. And it quickly reminded me why I stopped bothering with direct-to-streaming films.

This one comes to us from writer/director Geremy Jasper, previously responsible for Patti Cake$ in 2017. If you haven’t seen the movie (and if you say you have, I feel reasonably confident calling you a liar), Patti Cake$ was a formulaic yet charming and breathlessly sincere movie about a young woman coming of age and coming up from the gutter to try and make her name as a professional rapper.

And now we have O’Dessa, in which writer/director Jasper presents a formulaic yet charming and breathlessly sincere movie about a young woman coming of age and coming up from the gutter to try and make her name as a professional… folk musician. And the film is set in a sci-fi dystopia.

We lay our scene in a post-industrial wasteland, where everyone lives in impoverished squalor and no food grows anywhere. (We never learn exactly where the food is coming from, which makes for terrible world-building, but whatever.) The only habitable city left is Satyllite City [sic], an urban hellhole where Plutonovich (Murray Bartlett) holds sole dominion over the nation’s energy. Plutonovich uses the world’s electricity to power his global broadcasts, using repetitive brain-dead trash that holds the populace in a hypnotic thrall. And if anyone dares to try and speak out against Plutonovich’s brand of entertainment, they’re sent away to his private island studio and made to suffer for the enjoyment of the masses.

So, we’ve got our evil fascistic overlord. Which naturally means we need a plucky young adventurer from out in the poor rural farmland, chosen by destiny and prophecy (I’m not kidding, this is literally and explicitly a Chosen One story) to take him down. Enter O’Dessa Galloway, played by Sadie Sink.

O’Dessa’s father was a rambler who left to perform his music in places unknown, leaving behind nothing but his magic guitar (again, I’m not kidding) and his vague promises of a great destiny for O’Dessa. After her mother passes quietly of old age, O’Dessa leaves her desolate farmhouse and literally burns it down behind her. She sets out to make her fortune and it’s off to the races.

The first act makes it perfectly clear that this is a monomyth. In fact, this isn’t just any monomyth, this is a straight-up retelling of “Orpheus and Eurydice”, one of the foundational monomyths. And as soon as I figured that out, I started worrying that the filmmakers were going to cop out and tweak the iconic ending so it all turns out happily in the end. But no, the filmmakers actually figured out how to have it both ways. That’s genuinely impressive. Kudos.

There are, however, two big problems. The first is that we’ve got a post-modern retelling of “Orpheus and Eurydice”, and it’s a musical with folk/bluegrass stylings. As a reminder, Hadestown won eight Tonys out of fourteen nominations — including Best Musical and Best Original Score — for its first Broadway run back in goddamn 2019. I have a difficult time recommending this movie or even making the case for its existence when we’ve got an all-time instant classic musical that did pretty much the exact same thing, but infinitely better and with so much less bullshit.

The second big problem is that the actual “Orpheus and Eurydice” myth as we know it doesn’t actually happen until the third act. And the lead-up to that third act is sloppy as hell.

To start with, the Persephone counterpart (played by Dora Dimic Rakar) doesn’t show up or get a single mention until the freaking climax. That seems like a glaring omission, and the Queen of the Afterlife really should’ve been more of a presence. Instead, we’ve got Regina Hall thoroughly wasting her talents on “Neon Dion”, a one-dimensional bully who ultimately serves no purpose whatsoever.

Even when Dion causes irreparable harm just before the hour-mark, the movie inexplicably keeps on going like nothing happened. We can clearly see the huge gaping wound there, and nobody talks about it or works around it or anything. Not even an inconvenience.

Then we have the matter of our Eurydice counterpart (here named “Eury Dervish”, played by Kelvin Harrison Jr.). To be clear, I respect how the filmmakers play fast and loose with gender norms where our central romantic pairing is concerned. Sadie Sink anchors the film superbly well. Kelvin Harrison Jr. paid his dues back in Chevalier and I’m thrilled to see him get more work.

But Sink and Harrison together simply don’t work as a romantic item. Not to the extent this movie needed. Remember, we’re talking about a retelling of “Orpheus and Eurydice”, one of the greatest romantic tragedies in all of fiction. And this is explicitly a story about love conquering all, to the point where that’s literally a recurring line of spoken dialogue throughout the film. By those high standards, the chemistry between our two romantic leads isn’t nearly enough.

All of this to say that the second act sucks. We’ve got botched payoffs, dead-end setups, and wasted characters in this plot that wanders aimlessly while padding out the runtime until we finally get to the third act. Granted, the film does have a lot to say about kindness in a cruel time, justice in an unjust culture, creativity in the face of corporate-run monotony, and so on. It’s easy to see how the filmmakers could’ve used the “Orpheus and Eurydice” myth to dovetail together all these themes in a much better story. (Of course, it helps that the better story already exists — again, Hadestown.)

But is the music any good? Not really. It’s certainly not terrible, and the cast does their best in selling it. Unfortunately, the soundtrack suffers greatly for want of — for lack of a better phrase — a single. There’s no one mind-blowing song here to define what makes the soundtrack so amazing. Hamilton had “My Shot”. Wicked had “Defying Gravity”. Getting back to Hadestown, that one had “Wait for Me.”

O’Dessa, on the other hand, has… “Feelin’ Free“. Not bad, but nowhere near good enough.

With all of that said, I’d be remiss not to mention the visual style. The whole film is drenched in neon — even the rural wastelands are awash with bright purples and greens. It’s certainly a garish film to look at, but that’s appropriate for a post-apocalyptic film about a populace held captive by mass media. There’s no denying that the film has a unique look to it. And sure, the world-building is trash — seriously, goddamn Repo: The Genetic Opera put more thought and effort into its setting — but seeing as this is a fable set on retelling a classical myth, that’s not necessarily a dealbreaker.

O’Dessa looks and feels like the passion project of a filmmaker who’s been carrying around this script since high school. The actors are all clearly doing their best, but they’re working with an undercooked script that isn’t nearly as deep or novel or provocative as the film seems to think it is. The style is certainly impressive, but it doesn’t distract from the hollow world-building and the uninspired plot. Even taking into consideration that this is retelling one of the oldest and most iconic stories in the history of Western Civilization, that’s no excuse when the actual myth only takes up the last thirty minutes and the entire preceding hour is uninspired slop.

It all evens out to “meh”. I took little pleasure in watching it, even less pleasure in writing about it, and the film has all but entirely left my memory already. As with the vast majority of films in the streaming era, this one only registers as “content”; not a thing to be enjoyed or remembered or considered, but merely consumed. Chew it up, spit it out, move on to the next one.

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