Repo! The Genetic Opera really encapsulates what I want to describe in “Bless This Mess” — I’m not sure it’s a GOOD movie, and I wouldn’t recommend it to people without some major caveats, but I love it dearly, and I think it’s FASCINATING.
So, some background: Repo! started out as a stage play written by Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich. It’s a proper rock opera: there’s very few spoken words, it’s mostly sung through. Then, somehow, for some reason, Darren Lynn Bousman, who at the time was fresh off directing Saws II, III, and IV, picked it up and helped pitch it to studios, who eventually bought it and produced it as a full movie, starring maybe the weirdest cast I’ve ever seen in a film.
Broadly, it’s about a dystopian future, in which an epidemic of organ failures nearly wiped out the population. A company, GeneCo, began loaning out organ replacements on strict payment plans, and if people fail to pay, they are hunted by Repo Men, who will, well, repossess the organs. Violently and on camera. While singing. It’s great.
Tbh if “gothic opera about organ repossession” sounds fun to you, you should probably just go watch it, because spoilers! Just go in knowing you’re about to have a WILD ninety minutes (yes, this movie goes at a clip).
There’s a lot happening in this film, let me see if I can explain it with any kind of coherency. Let’s go!
Me and the crew when faced with capitalism:
The Mess
We’re given backstory on the world, first through a graphic novel-style spread, and then via song. This happens several times, where we’re presented with functionally the same information two ways, but y’know what, I love a graphic novel spread. We’re also introduced to the concept of the repo men, while a chorus chants “repo man” ominously, and here I need to mention that all the repo men have different, distinctive costumes. This is stylized all to hell and I’m honestly here for it.
We also meet (kind of) the character Grave Robber, played by co-writer Terrance Zdunich, who plays basically a narrator role. He shows up every so often to sing at us about the story. He also collects a substance called “zydrate” from dead bodies (hence his name), which is used as a (highly addictive) painkiller.
We learn that there’s something coming up called “The Genetic Opera” (sure) wherein a famous singer, Blind Mag, played by Sarah Brightman (yes really, that Sarah Brightman), will be giving her farewell performance. Put a pin in this.
Next, we meet Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvino, who honestly fucking kills it), the founder of GeneCo. He’s dying from some kind of terminal, non-surgically-fixable cancer (this report is delivered on what appears to be clear overhead projector paper from 2005).
Rotti’s got a problem: he’s got three kids, Luigi (Bill Moseley), Pavi (Nivek Ogre), and Amber Sweet (Paris Hilton), and they’re all terrible nepo babies. He’s disgusted by them and he doesn’t want any of them to inherit GeneCo. What does he do? Why, seek out the 17 year old daughter of the woman he was once in love with and try to make HER his heir!
Said daughter’s name is Shilo (Alexa Vega), and we catch up with her sneaking out of her home to spend time in her mother’s mausoleum. She ends up wandering out into the larger graveyard to pursue a cool bug, where she encounters Grave Robber, who monologues at her/us about the lore again. Shilo is almost caught/executed as a graverobber herself, but she is spared, and then collapses.
Shilo wakes up in her very little-girl-style room being cared for by her loving dad Nathan (the late, great Anthony Head), who, uh, immediately gaslights her about having been outside. We learn that her mother, Marni, died of a blood disease, which she passed to Shilo, who is now very medically fragile. She then has a great song about being “infected” by her mother’s genetics, and how fed up she is with living such a sheltered life.
Then we swap over to Nathan’s POV, and we get another graphic novel moment to tell us that, basically, he believes he accidentally killed Marni when trying to cure her illness. Nathan sings about how consumed he is by guilt, how he’s “the nightmare [Shilo] should fear.” He also says some pretty red-flag type things like “Shilo can never leave, she is my everything.” Oh yeah, also their house is COVERED in holographic images of Marni. Anyway, at the end of the song we learn that he’s actually one of the top repo men, and he kills people in their basement.
Now’s probably as good a time as any to talk about how absolutely stunning the performances in this film are. Everyone does a great job, but Anthony Head is really the connective tissue in my opinion. His transformation in this number from “flawed but loving husband/father” to “Hannibal Lecter” is astonishing, and he sells the absolute hell out of it.
We then shift into a comedy relief argument between the three Largo siblings (mostly the boys) about who should inherit GeneCo. It’s kind of unnecessary but it’s fun and over the top.
Next, we learn Rotti Largo’s story: he and Marni were lovers, but then she left him for Nathan; he was the one who messed with her medication and killed her. Then, he used Nathan’s guilt to coerce him into becoming a repo man. He does not seem to feel that he did anything substantially wrong here; he addresses Marni’s grave and says she forced his hand (lol). Anyway, he functionally kidnaps Shilo, and promises her a cure for her plot disease blood disease.
Anyway, then we cut away to Nathan having just a great time disemboweling a man while he sings about it being a “thankless job.” Side note, (nearly) all the gore in this film is done with practical effects, so it all looks pretty amazing. This scene culminates with Nathan sticking his hand up the man’s throat and using him as a puppet to sing along.
Rotti brings Shilo to GeneCo’s big festival, and introduces her to Blind Mag, who she’s a big fan of. Finally, we get the last piece of the Rotti-Marni-Nathan story: Mag was Marni’s best friend, and she needed an eye transplant. It’s kind of implied that Marni dated Rotti in order to help Mag get this deal, which I really like as explanation. We don’t get to know Marni a lot beyond “dead mom,” but this characterization works for me and makes her feel a lot more alive as a person in this story.
Unfortunately for Mag, this functionally means that GeneCo owns her; she and Rotti do a little interview about her upcoming retirement where he “jokes” about this fact, and she is visibly uncomfortable.
We then get to honestly one of my favourite scenes: alone in a tent, Shilo’s medication reminder goes off for her and for Nathan, who’s currently hunting down another mark. He calls to check in, and they both lie to each other about the ambient noises the other can hear. In particular, I love this exchange:
Shilo: will [the patient] live?
Nathan: *breaks neck* it’s looking grim :/
Shilo, knowing her dad is on his way home, sneaks out of the carnival with the help of Grave Robber, who conveniently appears. He takes her through the backroads, where she encounters sex workers addicted to surgery and zydrate, the drug made from corpses. Grave Robber is a dealer and also maybe a pimp, it’s unclear, and they do a whole number that’s maybe the catchiest song in the whole thing.
Amber Sweet, Rotti’s daughter, comes to get her fix, too, and we learn from her and Grave Robber that when Blind Mag quits, her eyes will be repossessed. Shilo is understandably distraught by this. Grave Robber, after some fucking about, helps her get back to her house, just in time for her dad to check up on her.
Nathan is called to GeneCo headquarters to deliver his uh, items (he spends so much time trucking back and forth in this movie lol) and to get his new assignment: repossessing Mag’s eyes. Nathan initially refuses, but after Rotti and his kids and some backup Repo Men sing at him, he…continues to refuse.
This is maybe my favourite scene in the whole show, I cannot explain how absolutely ridiculous it is, it’s SO over the top melodramatic and campy, but Anthony Head and Paul Sorvino are playing it 100% seriously. 10/10 no notes. If you’re going to watch one scene from this film, look up “Night Surgeon” and enjoy. I was trying to pick my favourite line and I can’t, they’re all so silly, but Head singing sincerely, “when I remember/I dismember” might be it.
Meanwhile, Blind Mag appears at Shilo’s home and Shilo chooses to let her in, though this is against the rules. Mag thought she died with Marni, and seems devastated by having lost the opportunity to spend time with Shilo. Clearly knowing she’s out of time, she begs Shilo to live her life for herself.
Nathan returns home and tells Mag to leave. She calls him out on having lied to her for 17+ years and for being controlling, and he refuses to engage, saying Shilo’s too sick to…have any other relationships. Shilo, meanwhile, begs Nathan to hide Mag from the repo men (lol). There’s a really fun part where they’re all singing at the same time, but ultimately, Nathan throws Mag out.
I want to just take a second to shout out how much I really love Mag as a character. In particular, she’s the only one who, start to finish, sees and values Shilo as a person beyond being Marni’s daughter. When Shilo expresses worry about Mag, even, she tells her not to! Even though she clearly knows she’s slated for repossession (and therefore death), she refuses to put this burden on Shilo.
Anyway, Shilo tells Nathan that he has to save Mag and stop the Repo Man. Obviously this is fun for irony reasons but I also find it kind of adorable that Shilo believes her dad, whom she thinks is just a normal middle-aged doctor, can stop a trained assassin.
Him saying no infuriates Shilo, and she retaliates by trashing her girlish room and refusing his narrative of her. Real Life Joan Jett appears in the background to do a guitar solo. This finishes with the line, “You cannot control me father/Daddy’s girl’s a fucking monster.” Nathan slaps her, and then feels bad about it, I GUESS.
Meanwhile, Amber Sweet approaches Rotti about getting her face all fucked up in bad plastic surgery. Rotti tells her “you are a disgrace, your genes are not worthy of mine” but ultimately agrees to get her fixed up so she can sing at the opera. This is an interesting counterpoint to the scene between Nathan and Shilo, though ultimately I think I just come away thinking they’re both bad dads in different ways. Anyway, he does sing a killer solo after this while writing his will.
Rotti invites Shilo to the Genetic Opera, promising her cure will be there, which Nathan sees before he is attacked by GeneCo employees. Shilo leaves despite him calling after her, beginning the best song in the whole goddamn movie, where we move between the various characters preparing for the opera. Nathan goes after her, Mag invites the Repo Man to come take her eyes, Rotti’s kids argue about who will get GeneCo.
Anyway, we get a weird little intro to the opera via a DJ telling people to “TESTIFY” about how great GeneCo is. It verges into televangelist territory in a way that I frankly don’t think the film has time for.
Amber Sweet makes her debut on stage, dressed like Marie Antoinette (subtlety is for cowards) but in a truly bizarre dreamlike sequence, her face just fully peels off from too much plastic surgery. She picks it up and runs off stage.
Then it’s Mag’s performance; she sings a slow, beautiful operatic number while suspended above the stage. At the very end, she sings, “Take these eyes/I would rather be blind” and uses metal fingernails to pluck her own eyes out. And it rules. Anyway, then Rotti cuts the cords suspending her, with a sword that he has I guess, and she falls onto some conveniently-placed spikes and dies. He assures the audience this is all just part of the show.
Elsewhere, Shilo is told that she needs to trap the Repo Man in order to get her cure. She sets a trap for him, where she can sneak up behind him and hit him over the head. He is revealed to be Nathan, and they finally have it out. He chastises her, but then begs her to come home; after seeing an image of Mag’s body, she shoots him down and demands, gesturing, “is that how you’d help me?” She runs, and he takes the wrong lesson, deciding, “Let the father die/and let the monster rise.”
Anyway, as Nathan follows Shilo out to the stage, he pretty much immediately gets taken out at the knees by Luigi Largo, which is just a hilarious follow-up.
Rotti turns this whole thing into a performance, announcing to the audience and the world as the curtain rises that he’s dying. Please keep in mind for everything that follows from this point that it is all on stage with people watching and reacting to it.
Rotti reveals first that Nathan killed Marni, and then that he is “the man who made you sick” — he’s been poisoning her to give the illusion that she had her mother’s blood disease. Shilo has a panic attack, and finally Nathan admits it too: he says “it’s me who’s failed you/I’m the cause of all your sickness” as she collapses in the blood on the stage. Oh yes, Mag’s dead body is also still in the background of everything happening here.
Once Shilo wakes back up (god she must be so sticky), Rotti lays out his terms: if she kills Nathan, in front of the world, thereby giving him the closure he didn’t get with Marni, he’ll leave GeneCo to her. Even hands her a gun. Predictably, everyone freaks the fuck out.
Shilo, like a normal person, hands the gun back, declaring that she’s not a murderer. Rotti asks, “you share your dad’s genetics, what if he passed this to you?” and she responds, “I don’t have to share his choices.” Meanwhile, Nathan has a come-to-Jesus moment where he reckons with his mistakes, apologizes to Shilo, and begs her to make her own choices. Then Rotti shoots him.
While Shilo attends to her father, Rotti tells his kids to get away, that they all disgust him, before dying of whatever cancer he has. Nathan is mortally wounded, though not so much he can’t sing one last song with Shilo about how much they love each other. He entreats her to “go and save the world for [him],” and then he dies. Shilo realizes that her life does not have to be dictated by her genetics, and leaves GeneCo (and the audience) behind.
In an epilogue, Grave Robber and the comics let us know that Shilo fled, but that GeneCo lives on, now under the management of Amber Sweet.
I don’t even want to give context for this image, tbh
The Actual Bad Stuff
So, I’m here for the graphic novels, I think they’re neat, but it does feel kind of silly that like four separate times we watch a story visually, and then are immediately given the same information in a song. You could remove almost all the graphic novel parts and not really lose anything important, and that’s just not efficient storytelling.
Thematically, this film is kind of a mess. On one hand, there’s an anti-capitalist message about healthcare and how fucked up it is to literally loan organs. That part’s fine. However, how this is talked about in the film is way more in the context of fashion and addiction — that it’s fashionable to get surgery, and addicting, and that it’s this GeneCo is exploiting, moreso than just the fact that…idk, people need new organs in order to function. I think this kind of confuses the messaging. Obviously organ repossession and murder are wrong regardless of the context, but “people are addicted to surgery” is a different message than “we have an extreme form of privatized healthcare.”
There’s a part during the lead-in to the opera where a woman TESTIFIES and says something to the extent of, “My liver was wrecked, but now, thanks to GeneCo, I can drink whenever I want” and that feels like a really conservative way to think about healthcare. It’s just a little too similar to “people are using abortions as birth control” or “you’re paying for someone who’s smoked their entire life” arguments about abortion and universal healthcare. It feels disconnected from what the movie is otherwise doing. There’s also some fat women in exposing clothes dancing in the background during this and I want to be on board with this but I’m afraid that it’s trying to do something very anti-fat.
The other major theme is about genetic and biological determinism; this is Shilo’s arc, going from “I’m infected by your genetics” to “my legacy is not up to my genes.” I like this plotline and I like how it plays out, I feel bought-in on Shilo as a character and her storyline, and it ties interestingly in with Rotti’s story, but I’m not sure that it’s integrated into anything else. There’s a thread around seeking “genetic perfection,” that that’s what’s behind the “fashionable” surgeries, but I don’t think it fully comes together.
Also, maybe this is a hot take, but I think Shilo’s story might be stronger if she did actually have the blood disease. If there was some actual risk that by choosing to turn her back on GeneCo, she could be risking her life, I think that might be a stronger ending? I guess then she IS still bound in some way by her genes, but people have genetic diseases in real life and still manage to make their own choices.
My biggest critique, and related to the above: I think Nathan gets off way too easily, narratively speaking. Listen, I love Anthony Head and I think he’s great in this film, but Nathan is objectively a terrible father. He loves Shilo, sure, but he’s also clearly using her as a stand-in for her mother, to the point of LITERALLY POISONING HER so she can’t go outside. This is unambiguously abuse!! But he gets to be embraced and serenaded by Shilo before he dies; she’s allowed to have her own emotional experience but I would hardly call this earned redemption or forgiveness. We are meant to compare him to Rotti in that he actually loves and supports his daughter (…eventually) but just being BETTER is not GOOD.
Again, I think this would be made a little better if Shilo’s disease was real. It doesn’t get rid of the coercive control, the gaslighting, or the slap, but it removes the poisoning part, and I do think that changes how I feel about Nathan a little.
Also, their final duet is pretty overwrought in my opinion, and it doesn’t make a ton of sense, lyrically. Shilo, I know you’ve been through a lot tonight, but he is your dad and your only living parent, what do you MEAN you “didn’t know [you’d] love [him] so much”?? Though admittedly, at the end of the song where they reprise “we will always have each other in our time of need/[Shilo/daddy] you’re the world to me” does kinda get me.
I should probably also mention the sexualization. The whole film is so stylized and unreal that honestly this barely registers for me, but there’s these characters called Genterns, who are the GeneCo nurses, and they are extremely objectified. They wear identical short dresses, heels, and glasses that block out half their faces. We see them grinding on each other for the sake of the show, having sex with Pavi, and getting stabbed to death by Luigi. It’s sort of on the edge of having a point (about how powerful men treat the people around them) but it never quite tips into subversion, and I can see how this would bother people.
Should we talk about Pavi? Pavi is a rapist who prefers to wear women’s faces over his own. I will give this film the benefit of the doubt and say that this is not meant to be transmisogynistic per se, but it does feel like it’s at least pulling on (perhaps unintentionally) some tropes that ARE transmisogynistic, so again, buyer beware.
Sarah Brightman, what do your genetically-enhanced elf eyes see?
In Conclusion…
This is such a niche film that I’m kind of shocked it got made. Do you like the Saw films but wish they had more singing? Do you like musical theatre but wish it had more graphic gore? There’s not no venn diagram, but it’s far from a circle, and no wonder this film was a commercial failure.
Ultimately though, I just think this movie is a lot of fun. Some people obviously cared a whole awful lot about bringing this to life, and it shows through in every scene. This is my trash. If you think you might also enjoy this trash, I highly encourage you to give it a watch. And then poke me on social media, because I want to hear your thoughts.
I give Repo! The Genetic Opera 4.5 repossessed hearts/5 (mark them up!!!)