SXSW 2025 is coming to an in depth and it was actually a banger yr for the pageant when it got here to style showings. From goopy sci-fi to a intercourse employee’s journey via Trashtown, the style movies on show right here knocked it out of the park with fascinating tales, horrific imagery, and a deep love of crafting uniquely twisted tales. Plus, these movies are indicative of a rising shift throughout the style, one that’s eschewing the standard trauma horror for one thing extra empathetic, entertaining, and bizarre. Filmmakers aren’t afraid to take acquainted tales and put actually fascinating twists on them, significantly via technical points like lighting, music, sound design, and costuming. We’re getting into a brand new period of horror and if SXSW 2025 was any indicator, then the style’s future is trying very shiny.
Whereas we reviewed fairly a number of movies out of the pageant, we needed to share a number of extra titles we watched and beloved out of SXSW. Verify them out beneath.
Fucktoys (dir. Annapurna Sriram)
4.5 stars
Annapurna Sriram’s directorial debut is a pastel-soaked piece of lovely trash that follows intercourse employee AP (performed by Sriram) via her journey to earn $1000 and discover herself a child lamb to sacrifice to rid herself of a curse. Who cursed her and why? No concept, however as Large Freedia’s psychic swamp witch character explains, “Or not it’s like that.” Amen, Large Freedia. Amen. This movie is a intercourse employee’s odyssey via the fictional Trashtown, a Troma-like place that’s each pastoral and disgusting, lovely and horrible all in the identical breath. Alongside the way in which, AP collects mates, meets new freaks, and makes use of her physique to assist her curse-breaking mission. Amongst these mates is the chain-smoking, ass-kicking Danni (Sadie Scott), who joins AP on her journey and rides on the again of AP’s Vespa, fortunately alongside for the fucked-up experience.
To be blunt, that is the way you do a movie about intercourse staff (stares immediately at Sean Baker and Anora). Sure, Sriram reveals the troublesome and harrowing realities of intercourse work even on this cotton sweet nightmare. However she doesn’t linger on that, as an alternative crafting AP and her band of intercourse employee baddies as a gaggle of people that take no shit and can do what it takes to outlive in a capitalistic nightmare. Cash is all the things, particularly in Trashtown, and AP is consistently reminded of that as psychics demand cash to assist break her curse and males attempt to swindle her out of suggestions.
Nothing is that this world is free and AP could be very conscious of that reality. So, she makes use of her physique and bedazzled flip telephone to try to rack up the required money. This isn’t a tragic story about intercourse work, however slightly one girl’s discovery that she actually can’t do all of it by herself.
Trashtown could also be gross, however I might spend hours there. From AP’s idyllic bed room outdoors in a fantastic inexperienced discipline to the unusual staff who sweep the road whereas sporting large water cooler bottles on their head, Sriram and her workforce poured all the things that they had into crafting this alternate actuality that feels acquainted but heightened in its aesthetics. Whereas by no means falling into full gross-out mode ala Troma (although there are fairly a number of poop jokes and moments of throwing round bodily fluids), Sriram isn’t afraid to be a Gross Lady™. Certain AP is the image of femininity in her lacy white socks, clear pleasers, purple hair bow, and floral matching units. However that doesn’t preserve Sriram from splattering her bubblegum exploitation movie with somewhat little bit of human excrement. Please, somebody bathe Sriram with money to make her subsequent movie. The world wants it. However extra importantly, I want it.
Odyssey (dir. Gerard Johnson)
4 stars
Reveals like Promoting Sundown have created a way of glamor and extra all over the world of actual property. All they do is put on excessive heels, present multi-million greenback properties, and rake within the commissions. However Gerard Johnson (Hyena, Muscle) creates a a lot grittier have a look at the career in his new movie, Odyssey. The movie follows Natasha (Polly Maberly), a London agent who works at a agency that finds leases and houses for purchasers and appears to have all of it collectively. However beneath her steely glare and sharp pixie haircut is a girl on the sting of chaos.
She owes cash to fairly a number of folks, together with two cash lenders who aren’t essentially the most savory males. Traces of coke preserve her going as she dodges dental payments, skips out on paying for meals, and ignores numerous calls from folks demanding their a reimbursement. Instantly Johnson locations Natasha in a stress cooker that may inevitably explode. It’s only a matter of time.
And when it does explode, it does in such superb vogue. Whereas all the things is constructing to this third act, Johnson nonetheless retains Odyssey excessive anxiousness, by no means letting you chill out as you watch Natasha rip her approach via London, scamming tenants into disgustingly costly residences and slithering away from collectors like an eel. Maberly’s efficiency is essential to the movie’s emotional pay-off and she or he nails it after which some. She’s a frayed wire, about to snap, however she hides it underneath a steely exterior. Maberly embodies the desperation of a girl who simply desires to know success however can really feel it slipping via her palms like grains of sand.
Odyssey is on par with movies like Uncut Gems and Good Time in its nonstop descent right into a hell of our lead character’s personal creation. It’s a heart-pounding expertise that’ll have you ever on the sting of your seat till its ultimate moments. And to assume it’s throughout promoting overpriced actual property in London.
American Sweatshop (dir. Uta Briesewitz)
3.5 stars
Uta Briesewitz’s newest characteristic stars Lili Reinhart as Daisy Moriarty, a 25-year-old looking for her place in life. She spends her days working at an organization accountable for moderating video content material, that means she and her colleagues have to look at the worst the web has to supply over and over, finally, within the identify of capitalism. Everybody who works there may be hardened to the content material, every growing their very own coping mechanisms to make it via a shift, whether or not it’s arduous liquor, a joint, or breaking gentle bulbs within the car parking zone. Regardless of how a lot workers complain and break down on the clock, their company overlord instructions them to make quota it doesn’t matter what.
At night time, Daisy endlessly scrolls via her telephone whereas she will get stoned, eats leftovers, and rots on her sofa. She’s the quintessential depressed grownup, struggling via their 20s and looking for a function within the digital world. Then, at some point, Daisy comes throughout a very rotten video that sticks in her mind and sends her on a harmful spiral. Satisfied the video is actual and never staged, she turns into obsessive about discovering the person accountable for such a horrific act of violence.
American Sweatshop is the Florida (no, actually, it’s set in Florida) cousin to Pascal Plante’s 2024 cyber thriller Purple Rooms, working in related territories however with wildly totally different characters who embrace very particular manufacturers of chaotic justice. Fascinating in story however gentle on character growth, it’s general a tense little thriller about making an attempt to grasp actuality within the twenty first century.
Like Purple Rooms, Briesewitz opts for sound design and response photographs slightly than exhibiting acts of depravity on to the viewer. This isn’t a film about stunning the viewer, however slightly interrogating {our relationships} with the web, scrolling, and the way straightforward it’s to control fact. It’s scrappy, imply, and tense, a posh have a look at what it means to work within the very actual world of content material moderation.
The True Magnificence Of Being Bitten By A Tick (dir. Peter Ohs)
3.5 stars
Peter Ohs is aware of how one can domesticate a weird vibe. If you happen to’ve seen his movie Jethica, you already know precisely what I imply. Together with his newest movie The True Magnificence Of Being Bitten By A Tick, Ohs continues that development whereas additionally crafting one of many weirdest and most unnerving movies I’ve ever seen about turning into an grownup and dealing with the horrors of day by day life.
Zoe Chao performs Yvonne, a grieving 30-something who must get out of town to clear her head. So, she calls up previous good friend Camille (Callie Hernandez), who presents to let Yvonne come to her new nation property and simply unwind. However instantly upon her arrival, all the things feels off, particularly as Camille greets Yvonne with Camille’s actual property agent Isaac (Jeremy O. Harris) and his accomplice A.J. (James Cusati-Moyer). Everybody appears very calm, chill, and completely OK with A.J.’s subpar cooking whereas Yvonne appears like she’s suffocating. After a solo stroll within the woods to settle down, she finds a gnarly tick chew on her again.
From there, the story begins to slide into additional surrealist absurdity as Yvonne begins to vary and the world round her begins to make extra sense. It is a film that capabilities on vibes and feelings first and divulges second, which ends up in a gorgeously weird expertise with little or no story or rationalization delivered to make sense of this unusual actuality. Mileage will definitely differ relying in your love of vibe-forward gradual burns, however if you happen to’re prepared to provide in to the movie’s attract, then you definitely’ll be introduced with a deeply bizarre cinematic journey that buries its head into your tender flesh and refuses to let go.
Lifeless Lover (dir. Grace Glowicki)
4.5 stars
Whereas our Josh Korngut formally reviewed this title out of its world premiere at this yr’s Sundance, I might be remiss to not add my voice to the choir evangelizing Grace Glowicki’s new movie about about attractive, smelly freaks being themselves and getting their fuck on.
Glowicki performs a gravedigger who, after years of looking out, finds her soulmate, a person who loves her regardless of her persisting stench of corpses. However as rapidly as their love begins, it’s lower devastatingly quick as he drowns at sea. The movie then turns into a twisted tackle Frankenstein as a smelly younger girl searches for a method to resurrect her lover. What begins as a attractive romp via a graveyard turns into a attractive meditation on discovering love and being your self.
Glowicki is an authorized bizarre woman and I imply that as the best of compliments. She has an unwavering dedication to her imaginative and prescient that resembles a group theater manufacturing of a German Expressionist horror movie. I can’t wait to point out it to everybody I do know.
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