'Fucktoys' Review
- John Odette
- Mar 9, 2025
- 2 min read
Updated: Jan 3
Release Date: --/--/-- [Festival Run]
Genre: Comedy. Drama. Fantasy.
MPAA: Not Rated.
Distributor: TBA.
Seen for SXSW 2025.
The Verdict: A Must-See
Fucktoys begins with an old dramatic standby. Through a tarot reading, a witch doctor tells a young woman she is cursed and must pay a hefty fee to be cured. Because she is not made of money, she seeks a second opinion. We've seen this set up in other films, usually of the sci-fi or horror variety. Fucktoys uses a trashy, fantastical landscape to tell its story, its setting providing the irreverent and absurd characters that populate its credence for existing.
The main character, AP (Annapurna Sriram – who also writes and directs), scooters through the aptly named Trashtown, traversing from one adventure to the next. She engages in sexually explicit, or at least adjacent, services to raise the $1,000 needed to lift her curse. Her friend Danni (Sadie Scott) returns to town and becomes Hardy to AP's Laurel. Danni is interesting as a wild card. Both characters walk together in limbo, looking to find power and purpose.
The pair wander through Trashtown, finding sex work where they can. These inexplicable moments initially come off as crass, such as Danni carrying out a celebrity's submissive kink and AP being window-dressing at an expensive party. Sriram shoots these sequences to be queasy and awkward. But where a male director would either cut, she stays in the moment and shows us the vulnerability and grace of the exploited individuals.
Outside of a few small scenes and a provocative title, Fucktoys is rather tame with nudity. Sriram's eye for storytelling focuses more on this lifestyle's details, nuance, and politics. The film places the characters in uncomfortable moments to magnify these very concepts.
Shot on 16mm, Fucktoys is a tentpole DIY achievement. It is rough in certain parts, but it should be. A film set in Trashtown does not need polish; it is gross, unrelenting, and uncompromising with its production and attitude. Sriram's film is darkly funny, and her eye for creating surreal visuals is her biggest strength. Fucktoys is dirty, chaotic, and messy; it celebrates women empowerment using a dystopian landscape as its canvas and an imaginative stock of characters as its voice.
