Fucktoys (Dir: Sriram; 1h46m)
★★★★★
I have seen the future of trash, and her name is Annapurna Sriram.
The Fantasia International Film Festival is currently running in Montreal, and among its many offerings there’s a certain amount of trash. Trash cinema is a vital, psychotronic strain of film history – the cinema of edges, shadows and gutters. It’s loud, unruly, and proudly transgressive. It rejects polish in favor of attitude, turning low budgets, taboo subjects, and outsider voices into weapons of disruption. Often dismissed by cultural gatekeepers, from Pink Flamingos to The Doom Generation trash cinema endures because it speaks from the margins with wit, rage, and raw emotional clarity.
It was Alex Cox who said, “One thing cult movies do have in common is that they are all genre films… They share common themes, too: love, murder, and greed.” Gregg Araki declared, “My movies are for the punks and queers and the weirdos.” And John Waters urged people to “get more out of life – go see a fucked-up movie.”
Words to live by, but if you were looking for proof that spirit has been passed to a new generation, it has arrived.
This week Annapurna Sriram’s debut feature – bearing the kamikaze title of Fucktoys – blew the roof off Fantasia, in one of a string of festival appearances that are gathering buzz for this young filmmaker. Less of a calling card, more of a psychotic cinematic strippergram, Fucktoys snorts a big rail of the psychotronic cinema tradition and then sneezes it back into your face.
The film follows the skimpily-monikered AP (played by writer/director/star Annapurna Sriram), a sex worker under a curse – literally. In the opening scene she gets a tarot reading from a swamp-based psychic who brusquely informs her that not only is the hex in place, but she’ll need $1,000 and a sacrificial lamb to break it.
What follows is a loose-limbed, madcap odyssey through Trashtown USA – an alternate-reality America of lost dreams, broken junk, side-hustles and coke. Along the way, she teams up with her nonbinary friend Danni, and meets a televangelist, a cursed commune, and a washed-up celebrity with a kink for death, all while dodging signs and portents that her dark destiny is closing in.
Sriram has mixed white/Indian heritage, was a champion Irish dancer in her youth, spent time in London studying theatre but is Tennessee born and raised – all of which gives her a unique perspective on America. At one point an entitled strip-show client bluntly asks her “what are you?” To which she gives a bittersweet shrug and affects a happy “…I’m a ’ho.”
Sriram has said she “namedropped John Waters with her whole chest,” and the lineage is obvious: Fucktoys gleefully flaunts the grotesque, the absurd, and the erotic, all filtered through the gaudy lens of outsider art. Its episodic road-movie structure recalls Alex Cox’s Repo Man, and I suspect there’s a loving homage when AP enters a grocery store stocked with cans of “Cheap Beer” and “Dad Beer” – a nod to that film’s infamous generic product branding. But while Fucktoys may channel its psychotronic predecessors, it speaks in its own language – and Sriram’s own brand of romantic feminist yearning is something the boys never quite managed.
The world of the film is steeped in a kitsch Americana of 50s/60s diners, gaudy costumes, and pastel mopeds, with AP’s mother working a Formica-topped greasy spoon and the soundtrack buzzing with jukebox soul. But the otherworldly is infused into this world too. As Sriram adds “I am fascinated with mysticism and the occult as a lens to understand my internal self and the women around me.” That fascination bleeds into the film’s rituals, psychic encounters, and Tarot-inflected structure. For all its surface chaos, the film loosely follows the Fool’s Journey, with each figure AP meets representing another step toward transformation.
Shot on luscious, grainy 16mm by Cory Fraiman‑Lott, Fucktoys has the texture of something rescued from a thrift-store VHS bin and projected with love. The editing swings between rat-a-tat punk energy and dreamy transitions – and is never more beautiful than when AP cruises past a vast oil refinery on her scooter, its chimneys gleaming in the low sun. The image calls to mind the refinery from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), another feminist outsider film draped in genre tropes and longing.
This is a film that loves women and sees what they can end up going through. AP’s immediate quest for $1,000 (and a lamb) masks deeper needs that she is ill-equipped to ask for, and others are unable to give. Over and over again, a moment of tender connection evaporates because the wrong words fall from her lips, or a partner’s lips, or because the guy in question suddenly reveals themself to be a terrible person.
For a true romantic, maybe it really is all about love – but in a world of sex work, drug orgies, deadly curses and oppressive capitalism, what’s a girl to do? The answer might be that men will always let you down, so girl, you better back yourself to win.
This is a phenomenal start for Sriram, who has emerged with a strong voice, a transgressive impulse and a heartfelt vision of drop-outs, fuckups, lovers, ne’er-do-wells and dreamers who live on the edge of a dream. There’s no doubt that the likes of A24 and Neon will now be falling over themselves to give her a first-look deal. But in her journey to get this far, Sriram has talked about the financing meetings that were really dates, the producers who hit on her, and the notes telling her to change the title, tone it down, or hire someone else to direct. Yet she stayed true to herself, and we can only hope she continues to do so, because Fucktoys is the most exciting film debut of the year.
As Gregg Araki once said: “You’re always kinda searching, and you’re always, in a weird way, yearning for something… It’s frequently unrequited, and I think there’s something kinda poignant about that.” As funny as Fucktoys is – and to be clear, it is roar-out-loud funny – that yearning is in every busted-up bedroom, every weaving highway, and every soulful stare into the middle distance. AP’s curse isn’t just coming – in a man’s world, it’s already everywhere. But no matter how bad things are out there, there’s always magic in the air. And we’ll always have trash.
Fucktoys played Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival on July 22, 2025.
Whitlock&Pope 