Filmmaker Geremy Jasper follows up the dire “quirky white battle rapper co*ing-of-age musical co*edy” Patti Cake$ with another, somehow worse, serving of cinematic word salad. This time Jasper went down to the Hollywood Sweetgreen and ordered up “dystopian sci-fi epic honkytonk musical,” which would be admirably audacious if it wasn’t also abjectly terrible. Sadie Sink’s title character riffs and warbles through the wasteland in O’Dessa, operating under the assumption that a song can save the world. That may be, but not these songs, and definitely not this world.
Opening on O’Dessa’s Clark Kent-style homestead where she buried her pa and lives with her dying ma, O’Dessa begins stacking, and singing, its clashing clichés early. While the familiar narrative clearly works through the beats of a legendary hero going on her journey, its aesthetic and inner logic are so jarringly discordant that it’s hard not to get distracted by the details, especially when those details are a hair’s breadth from parody. It’s like if anodyne Muzak had a prominent bagpipe backing part.
O’Dessa lives in a dystopia that can’t decide if it’s steampunk, gutter punk, or simply cobbled together from whatever sci-fi scraps were left over from other franchises. It’s populated by grimy drunken wanderers with scrap-metal guitars, gathered around a hardscrabble campfire…yet they still have a drum machine. It’s a dangerous and carcinogenic world, overgrown with grass turned pink because the ground has been saturated by some sort of toxic plasma…but there are still gas station bathrooms, with perfectly fine running water, in which an aspiring heroine can stare herself in the mirror. These nomadic buskers are apolitical, simply defined by saying “ramblin’” a lot. A lot. But even in this nightmarish future—in a story so hilariously co*posed of Chosen One stereotypes and post-apocalyptic tropes that the most bewildering thing about it is that it’s not a work of satire—bad folk songs persist. Thank the almighty.
Jasper did the songs alongside his Patti Cake$ collaborator Jason Binnick, riffing on twangy country, folky Americana, early Elvis rock, and modern electronica-driven pop. Each song feels like an act of aggression, filmed without an ounce of the verve needed to sell their heightened emotions. To play these bad songs, O’Dessa needs an instrument. Thankfully, O’Dessa hasn’t just been told that she’s special, she’s inherited a (possibly magical) tool to channel that specialness. The film is filled with flashbacks to her daddy’s guitar’s mythical origin story; it all plays like Dewey Cox found himself starring in Jupiter Ascending.
Hilariously quickly, she gets her guitar, loses her mom, and makes her way to Satylite City (the word “satellite” sadly lost to time) in order to confront the villainous sci-fi oil/media magnate Plutonovich (Murray Bartlett), who’s on every screen in the metropolis at the head of some religious/reality TV cult. But even Plutonovich’s role in this universe doesn’t quite make sense. He runs the civilized world, yet his hypnotic show has breaks for sponsors? Who’s sponsoring him if he controls everything?
But there is no corporate critique lurking in the shadows here. Plutonovich is simply an excuse for Bartlett to do a maniacal, Russell Branded impresario routine, and for O’Dessa to gesture at some of its half-baked ideas about society’s problems. While the figurehead for the world’s oppression remains the big bad, he’s really only the focus of O’Dessa’s quest until she meets Euri (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a stripper-singer dressed like Frank Ocean had an Orville Peck phase. Running into Euri after an open-mic night, O’Dessa’s infatuation with the similarly troubled yet secretly idealistic musician bathes the film’s dirt-gray palette in a purple-blue neon. Their love, filled with sweeping platitudes and skin-crawling terms of endearment, sidetracks the middle of the film, as the pair squirrel themselves away in Euri’s penthouse and hide out from the nebulous villain who controls him—played by Regina Hall as an Aunty Entity knock-off armed with electrified brass knuckles.
Considering its audacious melding of genres, O’Dessa still rips off everything from Mad Max to Dune to The Walking Dead. It’s almost impressive how little the elements that O’Dessa introduces as its own co*e into play. The sludgey rainbow plasma is just oil, Plutonovich’s face-altering reality show is just background noise, and the villain’s ominous “eye in the sky” that helps enforce his cult is just another piece of sci-fi babble that never amounts to anything. And, as much as the film returns to its musical idealism, the answer to this over-the-top plot is violence—not violins.
But the meat of the film is almost besides the point. There is so much silly nonsense at the periphery of O’Dessa that it feels like it’s trying to make us laugh at it. For example, it will often cut to Satylite City’s Bene Gesserit-dressed nuns, who always end up randomly being the backing band for O’Dessa’s songs. She’ll be playing away solo, and then the full orchestration kicks in, the film abruptly jumping to a person in a full sci-fi burqa playing the trumpet or drum kit—despite O’Dessa having no relationship with any of them, nor any of them having speaking roles. It looks and has the rhythm of a joke, but it’s deeply earnest.
Thanks to that pervasive contradiction, O’Dessa’s boldness can never fully be appreciated, especially warped as it is by its head-on collision with the derivative script. Sometimes it’s so bad it’s almost entertaining, but mostly you can hardly see the screen because each frame induces an eye-squeezing cringe. The film industry needs big swings, overdoses of originality that make one dizzy with their intoxicating strangeness. But O’Dessa is a frankly ridiculous Frankenfilm, swinging for the fences with other movies’ imaginations.
Director: Geremy Jasper
Writer: Geremy Jasper
Starring: Sadie Sink, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Murray Bartlett, Regina Hall
Release Date: March 20, 2025 (Hulu)