THE STORY – After receiving a series of packages containing unnervingly personal items, a woman tumbles down a paranoid rabbit hole to find her mysterious sender.
THE CAST – Britt Lower, Rhea Seehorn, Jamie Lee Curtis, Anna Baryshnikov, David Dastmalchian, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Mike Mitchell, Edward Torres, Alyssa Limperis & Inger Stratton
THE TEAM – Russell Goldman (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 94 Minutes
Russell Goldman’s “Sender” is probably the biggest question mark many like myself had going into it at this year’s SXSW festival. Russell Goldman, who adapted his short of the same name, has assembled one of the buzziest casts in this lineup, filled with award-winning actors, for a psychological thriller about horrors that can come from delivery packages. It’s an experience that happened to Goldman himself and clearly left such a stark impression that he wanted to make a film about it. The logline alone was enough to pique my interest, so it’s all the more disappointing that “Sender” is an undercooked debut feature that neither creates suspense nor immerses audiences in the hazy headspace of the characters drawn into this conspiracy.
Goldman tries to establish the film’s paranoiac energy by opening with a debilitated Jamie Lee Curtis limping to her door to pick up a package from Smirk, the go-to delivery service these characters order from (clearly a stand-in for a site like Amazon). Curtis’s Lisa opens the package, begins to violently switch moods as she attempts to take her own life, cluing us in that whatever prompted her suicide attempt is caused by something obviously sinister. This evil eventually makes its way to Lower’s freshly sober Julia, who is in the midst of making an aggressive restart to her life as her alcoholism has taken her job away from her and strained her relationship with her bible-thumping sister Tatiana, played by Anna Baryshnikov. As she moves into her new home, hoping to take control of a life that’s slipped away, Julie, like Lisa, also begins to be sent unsolicited Smirk deliveries tied to glimpses of her spotty past. Julie soon begins to think someone is directly targeting her, which sends her into a spiral as she tries to prove once and for all that she isn’t losing her mind.
The thing is, with “Sender,” the film rests entirely on Britt Lower, who not only struggles to keep it afloat but also lacks consistency in her performance, especially given an incoherent screenplay. Lower is unable to strike the tone between garnering sympathy for someone in her position and selling audiences on the erratic nature that makes many not believe her paranoid conviction of someone harassing her. Curtis has nothing to do, along with Rhea Sheehorn, who plays the aloof Whitney, another member of Julie’s AA group whose unwanted friendship is forced upon her. Sheehorn’s dry delivery makes sense for how Whitney presents herself, but, like everyone else, she’s underwritten, leaving Sheehorn in the dust except for a few pivotal moments that only further the muddled motivations of some of these characters.
David Dastmalchian feels the most attuned to Goldman’s vision, as he brings the right energy to Charlie, the socially awkward Smirk driver whose romantic feelings for Julie play into her quest to find the mystery sender. But Dastmalchian’s character, like Baryshnikov’s, is just there to further Julie as a character and nothing more. Goldman all but squanders his ensemble’s talents with performances that perplex audiences more than entertain them. His direction doesn’t help either in selling the haze of scattered subconscious, as he tries to employ plenty of rapid cuts, time-lapse sequences of Julia’s manic behavior, and aggressively mixing the sound in an empty attempt to put audiences on edge. Even worse, the film’s pacing, despite a brief runtime, feels egregious as watching Julie down cans of Celsius and investigating this mystery builds to a reveal that is not only predictable but also unworthy of the time invested in watching it.
The distraught feelings Goldman felt in reality aren’t palpably conveyed cinematically, as “Sender” isn’t able to elicit a fraction of the emotions that rushed through him. Lower attempts to rise above the material, unfortunately, aren’t enough to warrant sitting through this half-baked outing that will infuriate those who stay through the entirety of its runtime, let alone the unassuming dancing end credit sequence that is nowhere as cute as it hopes to be.
