Christopher Rhoten
Russell Goldman’s Sender follows Julia (Britt Lower of Severance and Darkest Miriam), a newly sobered-up alcoholic recovering in a rental home. While attending an AA meeting, she meets the prickly Whitney (Rhea Seehorn), whom she tries and fails to choose as her sponsor. With no one around to hold her accountable, Julia’s recovery is made more difficult when, despite placing only a handful of orders, her home becomes a magnet for dozens and dozens of unwanted packages. Packages graciously supplied by the film’s delightfully on-the-nose Amazon knockoff, Smirk.
It’s a simple and smart premise. In today’s age, everything you could ever want is a few clicks (or taps, if you prefer the further convenience of a mobile phone) away. That works in reverse as well. Cookies and other forms of tracking leave us vulnerable to the whims of massive corporations, if not anyone with a coding bootcamp under their belt and a little creativity. Inspired by real-life scams, Sender is, from the jump, the messenger of an interesting idea: maybe everyone is out to get you.
Julia bonds with the Smirk driver dropping off all this junk—Charlie, played with creepy charm by genre staple David Dastmalchian of Late Night with the Devil—but that’s only the first stop in a story that creates crop circles with its plot. Julia’s not in the best headspace for dealing with this mystery, and she begins to suspect each and every person in her orbit, from Charlie to her prying sister, Tatiana, of flooding her home with tubs of protein powder. Each rabbit hole leads to more, even stranger possibilities, bringing reality itself into question for Julia and the viewer alike.
Sender is a stylish descent, to be sure, though that seems too soft a term for a film that attacks the senses so abrasively. The sound design of Sender, reminiscent of a Lynne Ramsey film, is fully realized in its assault, from the bone-rattling hum of a guitar amp to Gavin Brivik’s nervous, drum-heavy score, filled with anxious noodling on both the hi-hat and the toms. Visually, too, the film is a cornucopia of imagination, featuring POV shots of a package or behind the screen of a phone. There are about seven hundred weird techniques employed by editor Marco Rosas, ranging from speed-ramping to persistent flashbacks that flash on the screen like pop-up ads.
When Sender succeeds, it’s due to the strength and originality of the premise. Goldman, a former IndieWire intern, has turned his short into something worthy of a feature film. Every time Julia gets a package she didn’t order, but could have, or thought about (many are tied to specific, embarrassing memories she’s trying to forget), it serves as both an allegory for the surveillance-state potential of big-box retailers and a nice parallel for Julia’s sobriety, as going cold turkey brings clarity that stings like an exposed nerve. When Julia sees reviews for Smirk online that she didn’t write, or downs a Celsius in place of a White Claw, it’s a good reminder that blowing money can be another form of blacking out.
Yet, there’s a side effect that results from this excessive experimentation of Sender, one as large as the giant window pane awkwardly dropped off in Julia’s yard. While so many of these techniques work the first time or two, they’re spammed so relentlessly that the story (and worse, our connection to Julia) begins to suffer because of it. A half-dozen red herrings may reflect our beleaguered protagonist’s paranoid state of mind, but narratively, they’re akin to styrofoam packing peanuts—distractions that must be sorted through and discarded. The more you have to work to understand what’s going on, the less effective (and more annoying) this indulgence becomes. Especially when surreal, elliptical hallucinations are relied on to deliver plot points.
It’d be a cliché to accuse a first-time director of shoving every idea he’s ever had into a movie, but Sender is a potentially handsome package sagging under the weight of so much stuff. I haven’t even mentioned Jamie Lee Curtis’s character, who bookends the film, because her role, while intriguing and mysterious early on, feels extraneous by the time it returns. Lower and the rest of the cast can only hold it all together to a point—though, to Goldman’s credit, that point arrives fairly late.
It’s always an absolute drag to write something mixed about a film like this, a big, gnarly swing with obvious talent on the page, in front of the camera, and behind it. This film will be perfect for someone, but Sender tells its story in a way I frequently found annoying and hard to follow. Like the limitless potential for consumers to consume oh-so-conveniently, perhaps it’s a case of having too much of a good thing.
