SXSW 2025 is coming to a close and it was truly a banger year for the festival when it came to genre showings. From goopy sci-fi to a sex worker’s journey through Trashtown, the genre films on display here knocked it out of the park with fascinating stories, horrific imagery, and a deep love of crafting uniquely twisted stories. Plus, these films are indicative of a growing shift within the genre, one that is eschewing the typical trauma horror for something more empathetic, entertaining, and weird. Filmmakers aren’t afraid to take familiar stories and put really interesting twists on them, particularly through technical aspects like lighting, music, sound design, and costuming. We’re entering a new era of horror and if SXSW 2025 was any indicator, then the genre’s future is looking very bright.
While we reviewed quite a few films out of the festival, we wanted to share a few more titles we watched and loved out of SXSW. Check them out below.
Fucktoys (dir. Annapurna Sriram)
4.5 stars
Annapurna Sriram’s directorial debut is a pastel-soaked piece of beautiful trash that follows sex worker AP (played by Sriram) through her journey to earn $1000 and find herself a baby lamb to sacrifice to rid herself of a curse. Who cursed her and why? No idea, but as Big Freedia’s psychic swamp witch character explains, “It be like that.” Amen, Big Freedia. Amen. This film is a sex worker’s odyssey through the fictional Trashtown, a Troma-like place that’s both pastoral and disgusting, beautiful and horrible all in the same breath. Along the way, AP collects friends, meets new freaks, and uses her body to help her curse-breaking mission. Among those friends is the chain-smoking, ass-kicking Danni (Sadie Scott), who joins AP on her journey and rides on the back of AP’s Vespa, happily along for the fucked-up ride.
To be blunt, this is how you do a film about sex workers (stares directly at Sean Baker and Anora). Yes, Sriram shows the difficult and harrowing realities of sex work even in this cotton candy nightmare. But she doesn’t linger on that, instead crafting AP and her band of sex worker baddies as a group of people who take no shit and will do what it takes to survive in a capitalistic nightmare. Money is everything, especially in Trashtown, and AP is constantly reminded of that as psychics demand money to help break her curse and men try to swindle her out of tips.
Nothing is this world is free and AP is very aware of that fact. So, she uses her body and bedazzled flip phone to try and rack up the necessary cash. This isn’t a tragic story about sex work, but rather one woman’s discovery that she truly can’t do it all by herself.
Trashtown may be gross, but I could spend hours there. From AP’s idyllic bedroom outside in a beautiful green field to the strange workers who sweep the street while wearing giant water cooler bottles on their head, Sriram and her team poured everything they had into crafting this alternate reality that feels familiar yet heightened in its aesthetics. While never falling into full gross-out mode ala Troma (though there are quite a few poop jokes and moments of throwing around bodily fluids), Sriram isn’t afraid to be a Gross Girl™. Sure AP is the picture of femininity in her lacy white socks, clear pleasers, red hair bow, and floral matching sets. But that doesn’t keep Sriram from splattering her bubblegum exploitation film with a little bit of human excrement. Please, someone shower Sriram with cash to make her next film. The world needs it. But more importantly, I need it.
Odyssey (dir. Gerard Johnson)
4 stars
Shows like Selling Sunset have created a sense of glamor and excess around the world of real estate. All they do is wear high heels, show multi-million dollar homes, and rake in the commissions. But Gerard Johnson (Hyena, Muscle) creates a much grittier look at the profession in his new film, Odyssey. The film follows Natasha (Polly Maberly), a London agent who works at a firm that finds rentals and homes for clients and seems to have it all together. But beneath her steely glare and sharp pixie haircut is a woman on the edge of chaos.
She owes money to quite a few people, including two money lenders who aren’t the most savory men. Lines of coke keep her going as she dodges dental bills, skips out on paying for meals, and ignores countless calls from people demanding their money back. Immediately Johnson places Natasha in a pressure cooker that will inevitably explode. It’s just a matter of time.
And when it does explode, it does in such glorious fashion. While everything is building to this third act, Johnson still keeps Odyssey high anxiety, never letting you relax as you watch Natasha rip her way through London, scamming tenants into disgustingly expensive apartments and slithering away from collectors like an eel. Maberly’s performance is crucial to the film’s emotional pay-off and she nails it and then some. She’s a frayed wire, about to snap, but she hides it under a steely exterior. Maberly embodies the desperation of a woman who just wants to know success but can feel it slipping through her hands like grains of sand.
Odyssey is on par with films like Uncut Gems and Good Time in its nonstop descent into a hell of our lead character’s own creation. It’s a heart-pounding experience that’ll have you on the edge of your seat until its final moments. And to think it’s all over selling overpriced real estate in London.
American Sweatshop (dir. Uta Briesewitz)
3.5 stars
Uta Briesewitz’s latest feature stars Lili Reinhart as Daisy Moriarty, a 25-year-old trying to find her place in life. She spends her days working at a company responsible for moderating video content, meaning she and her colleagues have to watch the worst the internet has to offer over and over again, ultimately, in the name of capitalism. Everyone who works there is hardened to the content, each developing their own coping mechanisms to make it through a shift, whether it’s hard liquor, a joint, or breaking light bulbs in the parking lot. No matter how much employees complain and break down on the clock, their corporate overlord commands them to make quota no matter what.
At night, Daisy endlessly scrolls through her phone while she gets stoned, eats leftovers, and rots on her couch. She’s the quintessential depressed adult, struggling through their 20s and trying to find a purpose in the digital world. Then, one day, Daisy comes across a particularly rotten video that sticks in her brain and sends her on a destructive spiral. Convinced the video is real and not staged, she becomes obsessed with finding the man responsible for such a horrific act of violence.
American Sweatshop is the Florida (no, really, it’s set in Florida) cousin to Pascal Plante’s 2024 cyber thriller Red Rooms, operating in similar territories but with wildly different characters who embrace very specific brands of chaotic justice. Fascinating in story but light on character development, it’s overall a tense little thriller about trying to understand reality in the 21st century.
Like Red Rooms, Briesewitz opts for sound design and reaction shots rather than showing acts of depravity directly to the viewer. This isn’t a movie about shocking the viewer, but rather interrogating our relationships with the internet, scrolling, and how easy it is to manipulate truth. It’s scrappy, mean, and tense, a complex look at what it means to work in the very real world of content moderation.
The True Beauty Of Being Bitten By A Tick (dir. Peter Ohs)
3.5 stars
Peter Ohs knows how to cultivate a bizarre vibe. If you’ve seen his film Jethica, you know exactly what I mean. With his latest film The True Beauty Of Being Bitten By A Tick, Ohs continues that trend while also crafting one of the weirdest and most unnerving films I’ve ever seen about becoming an adult and coping with the horrors of daily life.
Zoe Chao plays Yvonne, a grieving 30-something who needs to get out of the city to clear her head. So, she calls up old friend Camille (Callie Hernandez), who offers to let Yvonne come to her new country estate and just unwind. But immediately upon her arrival, everything feels off, especially as Camille greets Yvonne with Camille’s real estate agent Isaac (Jeremy O. Harris) and his partner A.J. (James Cusati-Moyer). Everyone seems very calm, chill, and totally OK with A.J.’s subpar cooking while Yvonne feels like she’s suffocating. After a solo walk in the woods to calm down, she finds a gnarly tick bite on her back.
From there, the story begins to slip into further surrealist absurdity as Yvonne begins to change and the world around her begins to make more sense. This is a movie that functions on vibes and emotions first and reveals second, which results in a gorgeously bizarre experience with very little story or explanation delivered to make sense of this strange reality. Mileage will certainly vary depending on your love of vibe-forward slow burns, but if you’re willing to give in to the film’s allure, then you’ll be presented with a deeply weird cinematic journey that buries its head into your soft flesh and refuses to let go.
Dead Lover (dir. Grace Glowicki)
4.5 stars
While our Josh Korngut officially reviewed this title out of its world premiere at this year’s Sundance, I would be remiss to not add my voice to the choir evangelizing Grace Glowicki’s new film about about horny, stinky freaks being themselves and getting their fuck on.
Glowicki plays a gravedigger who, after years of searching, finds her soulmate, a man who loves her despite her persisting stench of corpses. But as quickly as their love begins, it’s cut devastatingly short as he drowns at sea. The film then becomes a twisted take on Frankenstein as a smelly young woman searches for a way to resurrect her lover. What starts as a horny romp through a graveyard becomes a horny meditation on finding love and being yourself.
Glowicki is a certified weird girl and I mean that as the highest of compliments. She has an unwavering dedication to her vision that resembles a community theater production of a German Expressionist horror film. I can’t wait to show it to everyone I know.
Categorized:Editorials Reviews
