The Idol
2023
Original language: English
- drama
The story
After a nervous breakdown derailed Jocelyn's last tour, she’s determined to claim her rightful status as the greatest and sexiest pop star in America. Her passions are reignited by Tedros, a nightclub impresario with a sordid past. Will her romantic awakening take her to glorious new heights or the deepest and darkest depths of her soul?
What it’s like
Glossy, saturated and deliberately artificial: pastel-lit Los Angeles interiors, velvet booths washed in magenta and gold, strobing club light that flattens faces into pure color, and wide tracking shots that glide through hallways of mirrors and sound stages. The cinematography leans on dreamy slow motion and hazy close-ups, while the score mixes hushed synth pads with bright pop production, so the music often feels like a dressed-up hallucination. Its vibe is seductive and unmoored, a kind of sun-bleached dread with a fevered sheen. It suits a late night alone, a binge across a few sittings, or anyone curious about the machinery of celebrity. The pacing is languid and uneven, with long stretches of mood broken by sharp, disorienting jolts. Its emotional register is manipulative and feverish, following a fragile performer pulled between ambition and a controlling, charismatic mentor. Intensity is high: explicit sexual content and nudity throughout, graphic scenes of sexual coercion and emotional abuse, drug use, and a steady undercurrent of cruelty that lands as unsettling rather than gory. It is not gentle. It is made for viewers who enjoy provocative, stylised melodrama and can stomach its darkness.
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