Opus, with Ayo Edebiri and John Malkovich, is a wreck at Sundance

Running time: 103 minutes.Rated R (violent content including a grisly image, language, sexual material and brief graphic nudity).

In theaters March 14.To watch “Opus,” the muddled semi-satire starring Ayo Edebiri and John Malkovich that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is to experience a movie quickly go from promising to punishing.Authoring the wreck is writer-director Mark Anthony Green, who’s screwed up a usually ironclad story: Unsuspecting pawns get invited by an eccentric rich man on a luxurious getaway only to be caught in its dark underbelly. Home run, right?After all, that was the set-up for Zoe Kravitz’s infinitely better “Blink Twice” last year and Rian Johnson’s “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” in 2023.Heck, it’s the rough plot of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”Green’s lesser, indulgent, tiresome spin is set around the music industry and the obsessive fandom it inspires.

What with Swifties and Little Monsters, his vision is topical in that it’s both relevant and completely surface-level. Yet at the beginning, “Opus” appears that it could maybe, possibly be fun.Glam-rocker Alfred Moretti (John Malkovich) hasn’t released a new album or been seen publicly in 30 years when his agent (Tony Hale) announces a record is finally on the way.The world is abuzz, and stunt-loving Moretti invites a select few journos to jet to his Utah estate and be the first to listen to the hotly anticipated tracks.This film should be reliably filling as pizza for dinner.

But the deliveryman is an hour late and has dropped the box.Aboard the private plane and four-hour charter bus is Ariel (Edebiri), a driven New York writer who wants to make her name with serious reporting.Edebiri does her dry, cocked-eyebrow shtick, and does it well.Also along for the ride is her magazine editor Stan (Murray Bartlett), a big talker who’s threatened by Ariel’s talent and has self-centeredly assigned himself to write the story instead.

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