FUCKTOYS After Dark

Welcome to Trashtown, USA, rising like a pastel-hued industrial mirage out of the Louisiana swampland, where everyone has a kink and there’s enough bad luck going around to keep a bevy of psychics employed. Sex worker A.P. (played by the intrepid writer/director/producer/star Annapurna Sriram) has learned she’s been cursed. And it’s a gnarly one. A fabulously bejeweled Big Freedia delivers the prognosis and the cure: A.P. will need a thousand dollars and a baby lamb to complete the purification ritual, lest she be swallowed up by a black hole of bad juju. Thus, A.P. is on a quest for a few quick paydays and some livestock, accompanied by her perpetually pummeled, nonbinary twin flame Danni (an irrepressibly affable Sadie Scott). The film rides an antic energy from one beautiful mess of a scenario to the next as the two scrounge what cash and comfort they can from clients and friends. With its cracked sense of humor and garish sublimity, this assured debut from Sriram confidently coasts the cinematic wakes of John Waters and Gregg Araki, while charting its own sex-positive picaresque through the economic underbelly of the American South. Sriram’s refreshingly novel vision and facility both in front of and behind the camera inspired SXSW to create an entirely new prize for her, honoring Sriram with the Special Jury Award for a Multi-Hyphenate after the film’s premiere. –Travis Weedon