O’Dessa
The director of Patti Cake$ brings us a daft, shambolic rock opera set in an all-too-familiar futuristic wasteland.
The Bard of Bedlam: Sadie Sink
Image courtesy of Disney+.
There are no two ways around it, O’Dessa is a post-apocalyptic rock musical set in a dystopian future. It’s a dotty, hallucinogenic and surprisingly dark fairy tale drawing from a lucky dip of influences ranging from David Bowie’s 1974 album Diamond Dogs to Mad Max. Mad Max herself, or at least Maxine ‘Max’ Mayfield from Stranger Things – in the form of Sadie Sink – is the film’s saving grace. She plays the eponymous O’Dessa Galloway, a “19-year-old girl with stars in her eyes” who lives on a dirt farm in the middle of nowhere with her dying mother. It’s bleak. But it gets bleaker. The world has been poisoned and O’Dessa loses everything – her father, mother, home and even the one symbol of a sustainable future: her daddy’s guitar. For O’Dessa is a troubadour, a “rambler” who goes in search of a better life across an industrial wasteland peopled by creeps and weirdos. But, boy, can Sadie sink her teeth into a song.
The problem with Geremy Jasper’s film is that it feels stitched together from so many other post-apocalyptic narratives that one almost expects Stanley Tucci’s Caesar Flickerman or Tina Turner’s Aunty Entity to pop up at any given moment. When O’Dessa has her guitar stolen and ends up in the ruins of Satylite City [sic], she finds a populace hypnotised by omnipresent screens, zombies that have had the life sucked out of them by a megalomaniac TV presenter like a pony-tailed Simon Cowell with an Australian accent. Even so, O’Dessa manages to fall in with a sympathetic entertainer called Euri Dervish (Kelvin Harrison Jr), who invites her to stay in his honeymoon suite of a rundown hotel. After a bath and a tumble, O’Dessa decides he is the love of her life.
Because of its piecemeal structure, O’Dessa feels more like a freak show on a rickety conveyor belt than a film with a beginning, middle and end, and the lack of narrative momentum is a problem. It’s also really nasty in parts, where the torture of unfortunates proves to be the entertainment du jour, and Regina Hall’s strapping crime queen Neon Dion is an unforgivingly sadistic creature of the night. As she says, it’s a “perverse, cruel universe”, and much of it doesn’t make sense, not least the ring our heroine has been carrying on her finger for most of her life. Were it not for the plucky, tuneful presence of Sadie Sink (so good in The Whale, you may remember), this film would’ve ended up in the bargain basement bin that it so often resembles. One certainly has no idea what will pop up on Disney+ next.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Sadie Sink, Kelvin Harrison Jr, Murray Bartlett, Regina Hall, Mark Boone Junior, Bree Elrod, Pokey LaFarge, Marinko Prga, Aurora Kovacic.
Dir Geremy Jasper, Pro Michael Gottwald and Noah Stahl, Screenplay Geremy Jasper, Ph Rina Yang, Pro Des Scott Dougan, Ed Jay Rabinowitz and Jane Rizzo, Music Geremy Jasper and Jason Binnick, Costumes Odile Dicks-Mireaux and Anna Munro, Sound Bennett Kerr.
Department of Motion Pictures/RT Features-Disney+/Hulu.
106 mins. USA. 2024. UK and US Rel: 20 March 2025. Cert. PG-13.
