Sender (Russell Goldman, 2026) 1½ out of 5 stars
Beyond a fully committed lead performance from Britt Lower (Darkest Miriam) and some occasionally intriguing visuals, there is not a lot to recommend Sender, director Russell Goldman’s debut feature. A movie that never figures out its raison d’être, flitting between themes and ideas without settling on one approach to any of them, Sender fails to connect narrative dots a dramatically meaningful fashion. Addiction and recovery dramas come in all shapes and sizes; this one barely fits its many competing subjects.
At the center of the story is Julia (Lower), a very recently sober individual who is not working the 12-step program as she should be—she attends one meeting that we see—instead isolating in the condo which her sister (Anna Baryshnikov, Idiotka) helped procure. Hour by hour and day by day, Julia sits at home, opening the packages that come from the fictional company Smirk (an obvious Amazon analog, smile swoosh and all), most of which she herself has not ordered. Given her obsessive addict’s brain, Julia starts doing her own research to figure out the origin of these boxes, the movie following her down many unpleasant rabbit holes.
In a prologue, we see another woman, played by Jamie Lee Curtis (Ella McCay), also receive a delivery, examining each object within and then taking the bubble wrap to commit suicide by self-asphyxiation. The film will return to her later, explaining the backstory and attempting to link it to Julia’s own problems. Nice try; it’s a stretch.
There are other talented actors here, as well, including Utkarsh Ambudkar (My Dead Friend Zoe) as Dustin a former co-worker; David Dastmalchian (Dust Bunny) as Charlie the Smirk delivery man; and Rhea Seehorn (Things Heard & Seen) as Whitney, a fellow alcoholic whom Julia keeps calling as if she were her sponsor (she’s not). The plot swirls in increasingly manic and confused ways around the mystery of the boxes—some of which (though inconsistently) seem to contain items related to Julia’s previous life—and Julia’s attempts to find solutions. Though no doubt Goldman’s muddled mise-en-scène is an attempt to get inside the mind of a deeply unwell person spiraling, the onscreen results are just a mess.
What makes everything worse is when we do finally arrive at an answer. As much as what came before proved off-putting, I ultimately preferred not knowing to knowing this. The cause and effect we may have held out hope for is very weak, and the identity of Julia’s tormentor does not satisfy. The entire experience is like a bad bout of blackout drinking from which one wakes with but snippets of memory, none of them good. AA exists for a reason; it works if you work it. This doesn’t.
Christopher Llewellyn Reed
Chris Reed is the editor of Film Festival Today. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.