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Who are we? Why are we doing this? The existential dread hangs thick in the air in several films at this year’s SXSW, reflecting a country that seems increasingly uncertain about its identity. It’s not a coincidence that multiple films this year feature characters for whom reality quite literally fractures, creating impossible situations fraught with thematic tension. Sadly, several of them sacrifice filmmaking in pursuit of an undercooked idea, but I’m happy that young filmmakers are trying to hold a mirror up to where we are through genre film in 2026. It’s long been the best way to see ourselves reflected.
The best of this kind of existential horror in this dispatch is Caleb Phillips’ “Imposters,” starring two people who have done twisty projects like this before in Jessica Rothe (“Happy Death Day”) and Charlie Barnett (“Russian Doll”). They play Marie and Paul, relatively new parents of a baby boy who have moved to an old house that’s pretty far off the grid after Paul was shot in the line of duty. He survived the shooting, but it gave him a new appreciation for the randomness of life, so much so that he’s taken to flipping a coin when he makes major decisions. One of those recent decisions led to him sleeping with a co-worker, hinting at trouble in this marriage long before the unthinkable happens.
During a neighborhood block party, Paul puts their baby down for a nap, but he’s not there when Marie checks on him just a couple minutes later. Of course, panic ensues, and the local cops (led by an always-effective Yul Vazquez) search the area for weeks, but it’s as if the baby just vanished into thin air. The number one suspect is a local named Orson (Bates Wilder) who has a connection to the house and tells Marie and Paul that they can get their baby back if they go into a cave in the woods behind their property. Paul can’t bring himself to do it, certain he will find the body of his child. Marie does, returning with a healthy kid just an hour later. Except maybe that’s not their kid.
With echoes of projects like “Coherence” and “The Endless,” “Imposters” plays with ideas of identity, commitment, randomness, and parenthood, but struggles at times to tie them together in a thematically satisfying way. While the unclosed parentheses of “Imposters” can be forgivable (and often even preferable in an era when too many genre films over-explain), my biggest issues comes with the look of the film, one that’s too clean, too sterile, almost too commercial. This is a film that lacks texture, grit, and reality, too often feeling like actors on a set. The cave doesn’t even look dirty enough.
Having said that, it’s a film rich with ideas and its two leads never falter. Barnett understands a man who was already struggling to figure out what he wanted and who he was before the impossible clarified his inadequacies; Rothe has always been a deeply present and engaged performer. Some will fall for “Imposters,” and I won’t blame them, even if I long for a few tweaks in the version of this project that exists through the other side of the cave.
Another film with a confident actress performance arguably undone by some filmmaking choices is Russell Goldman’s abrasive “Sender,” a movie that sometimes feels like a cinematic anxiety attack. Goldman introduced the film at SXSW by revealing that it emerged from a time he opened a package at his door to find shinguards he never ordered. Why were they there? Who sent them? And what could their presence in his space mean? He takes this idea of almost-cursed objects being sent to someone who never wanted them to extremes in this genre experiment, a movie about a woman being crushed by the world of online retail. Aren’t we all?
“Severance” star Britt Lower is excellent as Julia, a recovering alcoholic in Santa Clarita who starts getting unsolicited packages delivered to her by a delivery man played by the great David Dastmalchian. More packages from a company called “Smirk” (an Amazon stand-in right down to box and logo design) keep arriving at Julia’s door. At first, they seem relatively harmless and random. Protein powder? Cymbals? But some of the packages start to feel personally targeted like a blender to replace the one that Julia used to use to make drinks. And why is there a masked man in her cul-de-sac? Her paranoia rises with the packages and then goes to another level when she finds reviews for these products on the Smirk site attributed to her. She didn’t write them.
The idea that a vulnerable woman could get caught up in a sort of existential version of online retail, becoming part of an influencer/shopper system that she never wanted to be a part of is a great one. Think of the data libraries out there of everything you’ve bought and what a system could know about you through them. We gave up so much of our privacy years ago, and that’s one of many themes of a film that’s partially about how the product pipeline has dehumanized us all.
The problem is that too many of Goldman’s choices as a director seem to actively be working against what Lower brings to his interesting script. The loudest and most hyperactive film I saw at SXSW (and might see all year), “Sender” is cut to death, edited so frenetically that it becomes abrasive instead of panic-inducing, and given a score that’s meant to rattle but too often annoys. The aesthetic approach was clearly to use craft to amplify Julia’s decline, but it has the opposite effect, constantly reminding us of itself, turning Julia’s story into one that’s too hard to hear through the noise.
My issues with the craft of “Sender” are amplified ten-fold in the frustrating “Monitor,” a film that wades into the increasingly crowded genre of how the internet is going to kill us but with too little to thematic exploration or impressive craft. A hybrid of “American Sweatshop” and “Slender Man,” it loosely suggests that our obsession with the ugliness of what we see online will be the end of us. In this case, it’s a Tulpa, a demonic entity that comes to life through online monitors and projections, able to kill anything that has looked into its digital eyes. It makes for a few interesting set pieces wherein the villain of the piece can only be deadly if its victim is being recorded by something, but it’s an idea of a new kind of boogeyman that isn’t embedded into a film that feels like it’s doing enough with its loose themes and thin characters.
“Monitor” is led by Brittany O’Grady (“The White Lotus”) as Maggie, a online monitor who works for a shady video company like YouTube or TikTok. She has to watch the worst of the worst, deciding if submitted clips should be rejected or uploaded. It’s clearly draining the souls of her and her co-workers to look at truly awful clips all day in the basement of an office building, but their jobs get much worse when Maggie rejects a creepy clip of a shadowy figure coming toward the camera and staring into it. She gets a message insisting she reverse course. And then people start dying.
Chief among my issues with “Monitor” is that the film falls into that common genre hole of recent years in which you want to yell at someone to turn on a light. Yes, the low lighting is meant to reflect a group of people who basically live their lives underground to protect us from internet demons, but it has such little texture and range that it ends up washing out the entire film. A movie can be shadowy and dark without looking flat and drained of color. It’s hard to even see what’s happening sometimes in “Monitor,” which sometimes feels intentional to contrast against the bright lights of the projected monitors that give this film’s villain life but also just looks awful.
I couldn’t get past the drained aesthetics of “Monitor” to appreciate what it was trying to do, but that does feel like an aspect that directors Matt Black and Ryan Polly could easily rectify with a future project. Like so many festival genre films, “Monitor” falls into the category of projects that don’t live up their potential but give just enough hope conceptually to make me curious about what they do next.
from Roger Ebert https://ift.tt/02PQfCp
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