You have to wonder how Britt Lower keeps her sanity.
On top of the star’s Emmy winning role in Severance, she now has followed it up with a truly bizarre psychological mind trip about, well, boxes, both in our homes and in our heads. Russell Goldman‘s feature film debut is as intriguing as it gets, a fantasia of paranoia and twisted truths and lies roaming though a woman’s disheveled life that reminds me of movies like Todd Haynes’ Safe with a fantastic Julianne Moore afraid to breathe, and Burt Lancaster’s slow walk of a mental breakdown in the film version of John Cheever’s The Swimmer. But taken on its own terms this is a complete original, expanded from Goldman’s short film, Return To Sender and given so much depth and currency by Lower that you may be thinking about this one for days after experiencing it. It is premiering this week at SXSW and deserves to find a distributor who understands it. Amazon would be the most obvious since they offer free shipping.
Actually don’t be fooled by the opening where we meet an older woman played by an unrecognizable Jamie Lee Curtis in silent fashion as she opens a box and caresses its contents, a mask of some sort, in suicidal ways. We don’t know her, and we won’t get to know her except in brief spurts as the puzzle of Goldman’s story takes hold. Curtis is a producer here offering the briefest of cameos to just add to the mystery of it all.
Julia (Lower) has lost her nothing job and moved into a rental. She is also, as we meet her, quit drinking and involved in an alcoholics anonymous group along with others including Whitney (Rhea Seehorn) who despite her own woes and misgivings reluctantly befriends her and helps her get her act together.
But what really screws up Julia are the deliveries. Her life is upended when the SMIRK driver, Charlie (David Dastmalchian) starts dropping off boxes, all shapes and sizes, and all the time. Strange. Julia hasn’t ordered any of them but they keep coming, and the contents are bizarre: lipstick, corkscrews, protein powder, condoms, and yes, odd masks. It is all a puzzle but these unsolicited boxes contain remnants of her past life, memories stashed away, warnings that someone out there is watching and messing her up. Or are they? Could this continuing parade of merchandise be coming from somewhere, something else?
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This is the kind of film where you have to fill in the blanks as Goldman, with exceptional editing by Marcos Rosas, flashes back and forth inviting others into the mix including the intrusions of her sister, Tatiana (Anna Baryshnikov) who has moved in much to her chagrin. Occasionally we get back to Whitney, and more including a growing kinship with Charlie who gets to know her through his route and the precious cargo he is carrying to her. It all piles up and up in the rental, along with her increasing paranoia and determination to figure out what is happening to her and what it all means.
Lower won an Emmy in September for that role in Severance which also didn’t hand off easy answers, but she raises the stakes with this one carrying the film in style as this Alice jumps into a rabbit hole from which she may never emerge. I only wish Seehorn, an actor with endless reserves of talent, had more to do because every time she is on screen you can’t take your eyes off of her. Baryshnikov is very fine, and Dastmalchian somehow makes Charlie fully dimensional as well.
This is a promising debut for Goldman who has found a way to take the more limited constraints of his short and to give it the purpose and time to thrive. It is a head scratcher, but one well worth scratching.
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Producers are Jamie Lee Curtis, Molly Hallam, Jake Katofsky.
Title: Sender
Festival: SXSW
Director/ Screenplay: Russell Goldman
Cast: Britt Lower, Rhea Seehorn, Jamie Lee Curtis, Anna Baryshnikov, David Dastmalchian
Utkarsh Ambudkar, Mike Mitchell.
Running Time: 1 hour and 34 minutes
Sales Agent: NA Sales
