Who are we? Why do we do this? An existential dread hung in the air for several films at this year’s SXSW, reflecting a world that seems increasingly unsure of its identity. It is no coincidence that many films this year feature characters who literally break the truth, creating impossible situations full of thematic tension. Sadly, a few of them sacrifice filmmaking to pursue a poorly cooked vision, but I’m glad that young filmmakers are trying to hold a mirror up to where we are in the film genre in 2026. It has long been the best way to see ourselves displayed.
The best of this kind of horror is in this submission by Caleb Phillips’. “The deceivers,” featuring two people who have done twisted projects like this before in Jessica Rothe (“Happy Day to Die”) and Charlie Barnett (“Russian Doll”). They play Marie and Paul, relatively new parents of a baby boy who move into an old house far off the grid after Paul is shot on the job. He survived the shooting, but it gave him a new appreciation for the randomness of life, so much so that he even took a coin when making big decisions. One of those recent decisions led him to sleep with a co-worker, telling him that there are problems in this marriage and the unthinkable is far from happening.
During the neighborhood party, Paul puts their baby down for a nap, but he’s nowhere to be found when Marie checks on him minutes later. Of course, panic ensues, and the local police (led by the ever-efficient Yul Vazquez) search the area for weeks, but it’s as if the baby just vanished into thin air. Suspect number one 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 help it, he is sure that he will find the body of his child. Marie returns, returning with a healthy baby an hour later. Except maybe it is not their child.
With echoes of projects like “Unity” and “Infinity,” “The Imposters” plays with ideas of identity, commitment, disorganization, and parenthood, but struggles at times to bring them together in a thematically satisfying way. While the loose parentheses of “The Imposters” can be forgiven (and often even better in an era where genre films are over-explained), my biggest problems come with the look of the film, which is too clean, too sterile, too commercialized. This is a film that lacks texture, grit, and realism, which often feels like actors on set. The cave doesn’t look dirty enough.
Having said that, it is a film rich in ideas and its two leads are unwavering. Barnett understands a man who was already struggling to find what he wanted and who he was before the impossible clarified his lack; Rothe has always been a deep and engaging player. Some will fall for “Imposters,” and I won’t blame them, even if I long for a few tweaks to the version of this project that exists on the other side of the cave.
Another film with a confident cast that was arguably held back by some filmmaking choices is Russell Goldman’s Torture. “Sender,” a movie that sometimes feels like a cinematic anxiety attack. Goldman introduced the film at SXSW by revealing that it happened when he opened a package on his doorstep to find shinguards he hadn’t ordered. Why were they there? Who sent them? And what would their presence in his place mean? He takes this idea of almost cursed items sent to someone who never wants them to an extreme in this experimental, film about a woman who is 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 begins receiving 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 harmless and random. Protein powder? Cymbals? But some of the packaging started to feel a bit more personal, like a blender to replace the one Julia used to make drinks. And why is there a man wearing a mask in his apartment? His puzzlement increases with the packages and goes to another level when he finds a review of these products on the Smirk site that is said to be made by him. He didn’t write them.
The idea that a vulnerable woman can get caught up in the current version of online marketing, becoming a part of an influencer/shopper program she never wanted to be a part of is great. Consider the data libraries of all your purchases and what the system knows about you. We gave up a lot of our privacy over the years, and that’s one of the many themes of the film about how product manufacturing has dehumanized us all.
The problem is that many of Goldman’s choices as a director seem to work against what Lower brings to his intriguing script. The loudest and most ineffective film I’ve seen at SXSW (and may see all year), “The Sender” is cut to death, edited so awkwardly that it sounds rather than scary, and given a score that’s meant to be haunting but mostly annoying. The aesthetic approach was to use art to heighten Julia’s decline, but it has the opposite effect, reminding us constantly, turning Julia’s story into one that is very difficult to hear in audio.
My problems with the “Shipper” craft are multiplied tenfold in frustration “Watch out,” it’s a film that taps into the increasingly dense genre of how the internet is going to kill us but with very little thematic exploration or impressive art. A hybrid of “American Sweatshop” and “Little Man,” it loosely suggests that our preoccupation with the ugliness of what we see online will be our destiny. In this case, the Tulpa, a demonic organization that lives through Internet monitors and projections, can kill anything that looks into its digital eyes. It makes for a few interesting bits where the villain of the episode can only kill if his victim is filmed, but the idea of a new kind of boogeyman isn’t embedded in a film that feels like it’s doing enough with its loose themes and small characters.
“Monitor” stars Brittany O’Grady (“The White Lotus”) as Maggie, an online monitor who works for a shady video company like YouTube or TikTok. He has to look at the worst, decide whether the submitted clips should be rejected or uploaded. It’s obviously soul-crushing for her and her co-workers to watch really bad clips all day in the basement of an office building, but their jobs take a turn for the worse when Maggie rejects a creepy clip of a shadowy figure approaching the camera and staring at it. He receives a message asking him to postpone the lesson. And then people start dying.
Chief among my problems with “Monitor” is that the film falls into that typical late-century genre hole where you want to yell at someone to turn on the light. Yes, the low lighting is meant to show a group of people who live their lives underground to protect us from the demons of the internet, but there’s less texture and scope that ends up washing out the rest of the film. A movie can be shadowy and dark without looking flat and out of color. It’s hard to even see what’s going on at times in “Monitor,” which at times feels like an intentional contrast to the bright lights of the projected monitors that give the film’s villain life but also a sinister look.
I couldn’t get past the finished beauty of “Monitor” to enjoy what it was trying to do, but that sounds like a feature that directors Matt Black and Ryan Polly could easily fix for a future project. Like many festival-type films, “Monitor” falls into the category of projects that don’t live up to their potential but offer enough intellectual promise to make me curious about what he’ll do next.
