O'Dessa Review

O’Dessa streams connected Hulu opening Thursday, March 20. This reappraisal is based connected a screening astatine the 2025 SXSW Film and Television Festival.

What happens erstwhile you premix Streets of Fire and O Brother, Where Art Thou? with the look and vibes of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon? You get a bold, vibrant, catchy, romanticist cyberpunk stone opera with memorable performances and rocking philharmonic numbers seemingly destined for infinite instrumentality edits erstwhile it drops connected Hulu. One of the champion scenes successful each of Stranger Things involves Sadie Sink and a large song, but that doesn’t hole you for conscionable however large her singing dependable is successful O'Dessa. Director Geremy Jasper tasks Sink with carrying his follow-up to 2017’s Patti Cake$ – and fortunately, she (and the sizeable enarthrosis pads of her retro-cool wardrobe) are much than up for it.

Sink plays O’Dessa’s rubric quality with a stoicism that hides earthy vulnerability: She’s a miss who acts tough, moves and dresses similar Elvis, and sings similar Hank Williams. In her mother’s words, she’s a "dirt farmer," and the past successful a agelong enactment of "ramblers" – troubadours who erstwhile traveled astir a now-ravaged scenery lifting spirits and providing anticipation done song. All O'Dessa wants is to fulfill her dreams of going to the dystopian metropolis of Satylite City to acquisition each its chaos and grandeur, accompanied lone by Willa, a legendary guitar made from a histrion that was struck by lightning.

It’s a communicative that’s powered by an alluring drawback container of mythology: What initially appears to beryllium a grimy Americana instrumentality connected Homer’s Odyssey – with its agelong shots of countryside, train-hopping, and colorful broadside characters – rapidly gives mode to a cyberpunk retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice erstwhile O'Dessa reaches Satylite City and meets the beauteous dancer Euri Dervish (an electrifying Kelvin Harrison Jr.). Sink and Harrison person ample chemistry, and they genuinely merchantability this doomed romance drenched successful neon and acceptable successful absorption to the dictatorial regularisation of a TV big named Plutonovich (Murray Bartlett).

Read what you volition into Jasper creating a villain who’s a media-savvy tyrant moving a high-stakes televised endowment show, but immoderate commentary successful his publication is little overt than this implied Trump analogy. The filmmaker prefers to marque O’Dessa’s astir almighty statements with its dazzling visuals and loaded costume choices. The cardinal romance is 1 large mediate digit to sex norms, with Sink playing humanity’s prophesied savior arsenic an androgynous popular prima with slicked-back hairsbreadth and achromatic tuxedo, other Harrison arsenic her tender, graceful, gown-wearing lover.

There’s gusto successful the songs, too, a soundtrack of 16 archetypal numbers by Jasper and co-writer Jason Binnick that representation O'Dessa's travel onto the improvement of American fashionable music. Bluesy ballads with idiosyncratic lyrics yet springiness mode to rockabilly and adjacent acid-rock psychedelia. Sink yet gets to amusement disconnected her Broadway-honed pipes connected screen; it’s a shame it took this agelong for her to find this benignant of role, due to the fact that her vocals are simply enchanting. At a clip erstwhile studios are inactive making musicals but look hesitant to merchantability them arsenic specified (who puts unneurotic a trailer for Wicked with hardly immoderate footage of Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande singing?), here’s 1 that boldly proclaims what it is, with small clip to remainder successful betwixt euphony numbers. It joyfully goes from 1 opus to the next, with the euphony keeping the communicative aloft.

Accompanying the catchy tunes is simply a beardown ocular aesthetic that makes O'Dessa basal retired successful a oversea of indistinguishable cyberpunk stories. A consciousness of naturalism successful the aboriginal scenes mingles with the look of a mislaid video-store favourite from the 1980s successful Satylite City. There’s an biology connection successful there, too, via the changeless show of lipid pipelines successful the countryside and the iridescent look of the lipid that powers Plutonovich's empire.