SENDER – Review by Liz Braun
Anxiety. Claustrophobia. Dread. Paranoia: Sender has all the good stuff.
To this psychological thriller mix, writer-director Russell Goldman had the good sense to add Britt Lower as the lead, with Lower (Darkest Miriam) playing Julia, a recovering alcoholic. Julia manages to be charismatic, funny and earnest all at once, and you go along happily with her on this increasingly crazed journey. The tough part is figuring out what’s real …
Julia has recently been fired and just moved into a rental home where she hopes to get her life back on track. She has allegedly quit drinking, but she goes to an AA meeting where some doubt is cast on her sobriety; at the meeting, she meets a woman she dubs whiskey Whitney (Rhea Seehorn) and asks if Whitney will be her sponsor. Whitney says no. Neither woman seems particularly committed to the program, but Whitney comes in handy later when Julia tries to prove to her nosey sister that she has a sponsor.
Julia soon notices that parcels arriving at her door are not items related to recently moving house. In fact, they are not items she even ordered. Many of the items — a drinks blender, for example, or the condoms she perhaps always failed to use —seem to point to her alcohol-soaked recent past, prompting unnerving flashbacks and threatening to push her off the wagon. Like many an unreliable narrator, Julia keeps things wavering somewhere between fact and fantasy; package after package arrives via an Amazon-like behemoth called Smirk — so many packages that Julia befriends the gentle delivery guy (David Dastmalchian) in an attempt to figure out what’s going on.
There are creepy things in boxes coming to her door, too, like a terrible mask that seems straight out of a horror movie. Moreover, someone seems to be stalking Julia in a van, someone in a similar terrible mask, although a viewer is never sure what’s real and what’s an extension of Julia’s vivid dream/nightmare life. For example, it’s initially difficult to tell whether Julia’s soft-spoken, rigidly controlling sister Tatiana (Anna Baryshnikov) is real or a figment of Julia’s imagination.
As things get worse, Julia takes an online job with Smirk, hoping she can find out who is sending the boxes and making her life a living hell by working on the mystery from the inside. But inside or out, there is no grappling with the faceless entity known as Smirk, a sort of 21st century boogeyman made up of consumerism, fakery and surveillance paranoia. It’s really fun.
The third act may or may not appeal to all viewers, but it’s weirdly comical. The film includes strange cameo appearances from Jamie Lee Curtis and Ken Jeong.
There is something raw and jangly and disorienting about every element of Sender, with sound and visuals working together to ensure there is nowhere to rest or think clearly, a perfect reflection of Julia’s frantic state of mind. The film, which had a successful debut at SXSW earlier this year, is currently on the festival circuit, so keep an eye out. It’s a feature debut for filmmaker Goldman and is based on his 2022 short movie, Return To Sender.
