SXSW 2025 Film Review: Fucktoys
ANNAPURNA SRIRAM’S DEBUT IS A MODERN-DAY “TRASHTERPIECE”
A 16mm stunner through a Tarot-inspired, heightened-reality Louisiana, Annapurna Sriram’s Fucktoys is a luscious, filthy homage to lost artforms and the best film out of SXSW this year. Minor spoilers ahead…
Filmmaker Annapurna Sriram comes swinging out of the gate with a fully-formed vision in Fucktoys, a subversive homage to a mode of cinema that is all but extinct. Surreal in its gorgeous, 16mm depiction of reality-adjacent Louisiana, Fucktoys finds footing as a dreamlike tour through frank, empathetic depictions of society fringe and sex work. In an entertainment landscape locked into puritanical norms and suffocating literalism, Sriram’s debut is more than just a tonic, it’s a defiant miracle.
It takes a wild amount of guts to namedrop John Waters and Gregg Araki in the Q&A for your first feature, but Sriram says it with her whole chest and immediately puts her money where her mouth is. Writing and starring in the film as well, Sriram plays wayward protagonist AP, a sex worker resident of a fictitious, time-removed burg called Trashtown. Decked out in 60s-inspired glam in a world populated with dial-up Internet, flip phones, and fancy hotels called Fancy Hotel, AP navigates a temporally-ambiguous dreamworld and starts the film in the middle of a swamp. Atop a wooden raft, her fortunes are told by a tarot-flipping mystic (Big Freedia): AP has been cursed, and the only way to lift the hex is to raise $1,000 cash, stat.
“Drop works as well as it does solely upon Fahy’s winning performance and frantic interiority.”
While the vague and nameless curse is Fucktoys’ inciting incident, it acts more as the tenuous thread that breathes life into the paradox that is Trashtown: an alternate reality limbo that is simultaneously a post-capitalist wasteland and a haven for lost souls. A freewheeling hangout movie that juxtaposes its tenderness and sense of community with candid depictions of sex work, a lesser movie would highlight its explicit sex, BDSM, and pissplay with “look at me” exceptionalism, but Fucktoys does so with no judgment and a refreshing, blasé matter-of-factness. For AP and her soulmate Danni (Sadie Scott), sex work is equal parts liberation and rigmarole, and Sriram is smart enough with her lens to deftly switch modes, especially when the lines of consent are crossed. From weirdo, egotist johns (its resident celebrity analogue is, funnily enough, named James Francone) to more sinister threats, Fucktoys runs the gamut of male archetypes and it’s these interactions that lend to its most tragic and poetic underpinnings.
Scholars of John Waters and Gregg Araki might scoff at Sriram as a pretender meddling with pastiche, but Fucktoys - remarkably - feels like its own thing that breaks free from its guiding influences. With echoes of Jim Jarmusch, Maya Deren, and the whole of the French New Wave, Sriram builds her own assured voice: it’s evocation, not imitation. In the end, Fucktoys is as much about desire and companionship as it is a dark mirror to our own late-capitalist society, and in a world where Waters himself can’t get funding for his work, it’s a breath of fresh air to see a young new voice step up to the plate, reach back in time, and make what’s old new again.
