What do we expect from a film emblazoned with a title like Fucktoys (2025)? – Something quite specific? Something more abstract? Extreme? Funny? Brutal? Actually, all of those descriptors could fit the bill, either in turn or in a more layered sense; this is such a rich and engaging, if always irreverent and often challenging piece of film.
We start with a girl, a nameless girl but for the initials AP (also director/writer Annapurna Sriram). As she’s revealing to a local psychic and tarot reader, she’s not had an easy life so far, but things feel ever more oppressive of late, right down to her losing a tooth recently: this feels symbolic. What is going on? Hopefully a reading can reveal all. As the cards appear, it becomes clearer, sort of: someone has “cursed the shit” out of our protagonist. It can be ritually lifted, but the tarot reader warns her, kindly but in no uncertain terms, that it’ll cost a thousand dollars to get it done.
That sort of money will take some raising, so AP heads out of the bayou (the film was shot in and around Louisiana) and into the big city (actually a place lovingly called Trashtown, variously a landscape pockmarked with damage and ruin, or the outskirts of a down-at-heel urban space). She plans to raise the money through sex work; we first see her with a submissive client, locked in the bathroom of what looks like a punk squat. In pursuit of anyone who might need to actually ‘use’ the bathroom – her client is still in there, so I’ll leave it your imagination why she might need someone with a full bladder – she runs into an old flame, otherwise referred to as her ‘twin flame’, Danni (Sadie Scott), fresh from a bare-knuckle fight (and not her last). Just prior to a highly unorthodox police raid, they flee the house on our girl’s moped. Clearly these are two people with a close and loving bond who then go on to divide their time between earning, spending, partying and struggling through various faux pas, with one biggie reserved for the very last.
Even though Fucktoys has an undeniably dark subtext, with its more overt darkness steadily starting to seep through as the runtime extends, much of the film feels almost impossibly warm and vibrant, despite all this. Clearly a paean to John Waters, the film is filled with gaudy, kitsch places, larger-than-life characters and a heady kind of anti-establishment charm. Trashtown itself is a bizarre fever-dream slice of Americana, gritty but delirious: it’s the perfect backdrop to our girl’s journey, and fits into the film almost as a character in its own right, so that it’s only when our characters leave Trashtown that the more abundant horrors of their situation can make themselves most felt.
Significant also is the limited sense of time in the film: bar one gaudy flip-phone, this could be anywhere between the late Seventies and now, but the film’s soft Super-16 grain and lush colour palette feels much more retro than contemporary. One of the film’s characters, commenting on the attitude necessary to thrive as a party girl-come-sex worker, describes a “spirit of abundance”: this could just as easily describe the style and ethos of the film as a whole, as it never feels anything short of lavish, even in its grimmest moments. Lots of this Fool’s Progress raises a smile, and it’s important to note that the characters smile a lot, too, though whether this is because they are genuinely happy or simply immured against the worst aspects of their lives is open to debate.
It’s also interesting that the film is punctuated by two, opposing sets of characters. One one hand we have a steady array of psychic mediums, regularly blurring the line between real and unreal, veritas and camp, and bound together by the spectre of this “big sexy curse” which our girl is desperate to end. On the other hand, we have the streetcleaners, kitted out in hazmat suits in this universe, deep-cleaning the film’s outermost edges against some unspecified, but potentially harmful filth which we never hear more about. These are two extremes, it seems, presented alongside one another, symbols of the vast differences at play in the world of the film. It’s a spiritual battle not to discuss ‘liminality’ at this juncture, but rarely has a film come along which calls for that term more.
Fucktoys sends itself up regularly, but it’s never vicious to its characters and, regardless of its explicit subject matter, it’s surprisingly gentle, with a female-focused perspective throughout. That allows us to see the undeniable brutality of an uncertain, perfunctory and transactional lifestyle without any proselytising, and the film is able to keep hold of its dreamy, oddball atmosphere, only exposing its sharpest edges at key moments, and letting things come to a worthily strange close under that blue bayou sky. Wherever writer, director and star Sriram goes next, it feels nicely inevitable that it’ll be someplace just as mesmeric and ambiguous as this. This really is a great piece of work.
Fucktoys (2025) appeared at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 22nd.