Sadie Sink needs to be freed from whatever nostalgia curse has condemned her to a career full of pop synth soundtracks.
If Sink seemed the obvious choice to lead O’Dessa – a dystopian rock opera that feels like an 80s retro futurist screensaver lurching to life – it’s because of her impact in Fear Street: Part 2 and Stranger Things. Both situate the seemingly wise-beyond-her years star in the reimagined past of 40 to 50 years ago.
Fear Street, the RL Stine adaptation, had Sink sinking her teeth into a giddy homage to Friday the 13th. That came after Stranger Things – that popular mashup of John Carpenter, Steven Spielberg and John Hughes – put her on the map. Who could forget Sink’s most iconic (and viral) moment in Stranger Things, reviving Kate Bush’s 1985 hit Running Up That Hill with a needle drop that releases Sink’s character Max from demonic possession, while sentencing the actor to even more time spent in the era of neon fever dreams?
The lilac hues and barren future landscapes from Bush’s music video for Running Up That Hill are among the recycled looks in O’Dessa, a mood board of a movie that cites Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain among its references, but in its final incarnation harkens back to cult faves such as Phantom of the Paradise and The Running Man. Writer and director Geremy Jasper, a former indie musician who scored a crowd pleaser with his hip-hop coming-of-age musical Patti Cake$, conjures up a world where a dreary metropolis drenched in plasma colours is surrounded by scorched earth. The images can be intoxicating, but his narrative, following Sink’s Mad Max-like drifter, meanders along, as if awestruck by its own lo-fi visual design.
Sink’s O’Dessa hails from the farmlands, her auburn hair complementing the rusty landscape. She comes from a long line of “ramblers”, nomadic musicians who believe their songs can change the world, which at present is ruled by a tyrannical gameshow host (The White Lotus’s Murray Bartlett).
O’Dessa is special. She’s the so-called “seventh son” according to prophecy, inheriting a guitar from her late father with the etchings of a tree, its roots flowing with liquid that turns luminous at her touch. In one of the film’s early folk rock musical numbers that stop the narrative dead in its tracks, and take on the qualities of self-contained music videos, O’Dessa hollers out, “On these six strings, I’ll sing my destiny.”
After her mother dies due to some undefined illness, O’Dessa lights out on the road, has her cherished guitar stolen by a carnivalesque travelling troupe and finds herself in Satylite City, a neon-lit industrial wasteland where the masses are kept in thrall to Bartlett’s grandstanding dictator with a man bun, Plutonovich. He hosts “The One”, an America’s Got Talent-like competition, which is where O’Dessa will inevitably be reunited with her guitar and stage a televised revolution.
It takes a while to get to that telegraphed finale, as O’Dessa first fumbles around in a romance with Kelvin Harrison Jr’s Euri Dervish. He’s a tragic lounge performer, regularly draped in fineries, occupying the kind of seductive role that would typically go to a woman. The film’s casual gender ambiguity, where Sink’s character, costumed to look like David Bowie, is referred to as the “seventh son”, is noteworthy even if it doesn’t amount to more than just vibes.
And those vibes aren’t enough to carry this dragged-out love affair, with O’Dessa and Euri occupying far too much time in bed, either caressing each other or crooning together, searching for chemistry that just isn’t there. Harrison (recently heard in Mufasa) and Sink are both wonderful actors who just aren’t in tune, what with him purring like a sexpot, and her rewiring the adorable teen romance energy from Stranger Things.
Regina Hall is another supremely talented star completely at a loss in this environment. She plays the black-leather-clad Neon Dion, a ruthless local crime boss who preys on and traffics Euri. Hall, sporting electric brass knuckles and delivering villainous platitudes with a stilted archness, can’t even lean on her screwball comedic instincts for some fun, never mind the levels of camp all around her.
Everyone’s stumbling along in a vaguely defined universe, which really only serves as a backdrop to catchy musical numbers that evolve from folk to pop rock. You might charitably forgive the clumsiness in the plotting were O’Dessa packaged simply as a visual album rather than a feature-length movie that long overstays its welcome. But for that to work, the music needs to be memorable. Instead, O’Dessa, in its aggressive pursuit to look and feel like a thing of the past, is doomed to be easily forgotten.
O’Dessa is showing at the SXSW film festival and is available on 20 March on Hulu in the US and Disney+ elsewhere
