O’dessa [Review]
Stop me if you’ve heard this before.
Stop me if this sounds familiar: a small-town farm kid is chosen by a higher power to save a ravaged world from tyranny. Ring any bells? Well, don’t worry—this time, the "chosen one" is a girl, and there’s singing!
Odessa is a post-apocalyptic rock opera starring Sadie Sink (channeling Ziggy Stardust meets Elvis), Kelvin Harrison Jr. (doing his best Prince impression), Regina Hall (doing Auntie Entity), and Murray Bartlett (giving Russell Brand). The film is set in a desolate wasteland where the masses are hypnotized by a televised regime led by the villainous Plutonovich (Bartlett) an any dissent is brutally suppressed by his enforcer, Neon Dion (Hall). On her hero’s journey, Odessa (Sink) meets the alluring nightclub singer Euri Dervish (Harrison Jr.), and together they challenge Plutonovich’s rule—armed with love, rebellion, and a whole lot of song.
In today’s climate, where the threat of tyranny and fascism feels all too real, Odessa comes across as oddly out of touch. The trope of a chosen (white) savior rising against a reality TV dictator is rife for artiststic exploration in 2025. But if you are looking for a clarion call of a movie that shows how to fight up against the very near threat of facism, keep looking. Given the film’s premise, one might expect a sharp critique of entertainment as a tool of mass control—how mindless consumption breeds complacency. Instead, Odessa settles for hollow platitudes about "love" and "freedom" without ever engaging meaningfully with these ideas. It’s as if the filmmakers thought that stuffing a Stranger Things star into a musical would suffice.
We learn almost nothing about Odessa beyond her musical talent—why is she the one? Because of her bloodline, apparently. (How? A burning tree, very biblical.) The characters are thinly sketched: Dervish exists primarily as a love interest, a role that, in another era, might have gone to an actress like Kim Cattrall or Lea Thompson. He falls for Odessa instantly—because the plot demands it. Meanwhile, Plutonovich is a cartoonish, power-hungry villain with no depth beyond his flamboyant menace.
Given the music’s central place in the narrative, it’s bafflingly forgettable for a film about the revolutionary power of song. Rather than showcasing music as a force of defiance, we’re given generic pop-country ballads with empty lyrics and uninspired melodies. Compare this to Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer, which brilliantly explores how art can resist oppression and the toll it takes on queer and BIPOC bodies. Odessa delves into none of those things, despite the typical YA set up, it deals with none of the issues that this generation is dealing with. The movie exist in a bubble where oppression exists but race, sexism, and homophobia don’t. Odessa seems to draw from rock operas like Tommy or Phantom of the Paradise in its flashy aesthetic but lacks their cultural resonance. Even the central romance feels lifeless, with Sink and Harrison Jr. sharing as much chemistry as two gay cousins home for the holidays for Thanksgiving dinner.
I wanted to like Odessa—if not for its execution, then at least for its ambition. There’s value in flawed but original storytelling. Unfortunately, this film is neither original nor compelling. It’s a diluted mashup of greater films like Purple Rain, Mad Max, and The Hunger Games, without the depth, character development, or story of any of them. In our current entertainment landscape where so much of our media feels like it was written by a group of AI in expensive suits, this film feels like asking the algorithm to write a movie about the Hashtag Resistance. We need art that inspires, that moves, that “confronts the disturbed, and disturbs the comfortable”, and this film is none of those things.
A baffling misfire from Geremy Jasper.
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1/5 Flaming Guitars
