O’Dessa streams on Hulu starting Thursday, March 20. This overview is predicated on a screening on the 2025 SXSW Film and Television Festival.
What occurs whenever you combine Streets of Fire and O Brother, Where Art Thou? with the look and vibes of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon? You get a daring, vibrant, catchy, romantic cyberpunk rock opera with memorable performances and rocking musical numbers seemingly destined for infinite fan edits as soon as it drops on Hulu. One of the most effective scenes in all of Stranger Things entails Sadie Sink and a terrific track, however that doesn’t put together you for simply how nice her singing voice is in O’Dessa. Director Geremy Jasper duties Sink with carrying his follow-up to 2017’s Patti Cake$ – and happily, she (and the appreciable shoulder pads of her retro-cool wardrobe) are greater than up for it.
Sink performs O’Dessa’s title character with a stoicism that hides uncooked vulnerability: She’s a woman who acts robust, strikes and clothes like Elvis, and sings like Hank Williams. In her mom’s phrases, she’s a “grime farmer,” and the final in a protracted line of “ramblers” – troubadours who as soon as traveled round a now-ravaged panorama lifting spirits and offering hope via track. All O’Dessa desires is to satisfy her desires of going to the dystopian metropolis of Satylite City to expertise all its chaos and grandeur, accompanied solely by Willa, a legendary guitar made out of a tree that was struck by lightning.
It’s a narrative that’s powered by an alluring seize bag of mythology: What initially seems to be a dirty Americana tackle Homer’s Odyssey – with its lengthy pictures of countryside, train-hopping, and colourful facet characters – shortly provides approach to a cyberpunk retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice as soon as O’Dessa reaches Satylite City and meets the gorgeous dancer Euri Dervish (an electrifying Kelvin Harrison Jr.). Sink and Harrison have ample chemistry, they usually really promote this doomed romance drenched in neon and set in opposition to the dictatorial rule of a TV host named Plutonovich (Murray Bartlett).
Read what you’ll into Jasper making a villain who’s a media-savvy tyrant working a high-stakes televised expertise present, however any commentary in his script is much less overt than this implied Trump analogy. The filmmaker prefers to make O’Dessa’s strongest statements with its dazzling visuals and loaded costume selections. The central romance is one massive center finger to gender norms, with Sink enjoying humanity’s prophesied savior as an androgynous pop star with slicked-back hair and white tuxedo, reverse Harrison as her tender, swish, gown-wearing lover.
There’s gusto within the songs, too, a soundtrack of 16 unique numbers by Jasper and co-writer Jason Binnick that map O’Dessa’s journey onto the evolution of American standard music. Bluesy ballads with private lyrics finally give approach to rockabilly and even acid-rock psychedelia. Sink lastly will get to indicate off her Broadway-honed pipes on display; it’s a disgrace it took this lengthy for her to seek out this sort of position, as a result of her vocals are merely enchanting. At a time when studios are nonetheless making musicals however seem hesitant to promote them as such (who places collectively a trailer for Wicked with barely any footage of Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande singing?), right here’s one which boldly proclaims what it’s, with little time to relaxation in between music numbers. It joyfully goes from one track to the subsequent, with the music conserving the story aloft.
Accompanying the catchy tunes is a robust visible aesthetic that makes O’Dessa stand out in a sea of indistinguishable cyberpunk tales. A way of naturalism within the early scenes mingles with the look of a misplaced video-store favourite from the Eighties in Satylite City. There’s an environmental message in there, too, by way of the fixed sight of oil pipelines within the countryside and the iridescent look of the oil that powers Plutonovich’s empire.
