SXSW 2025 Reviews: ‘The Threesome,’ ‘Forge,’ ‘The Rivals of Amziah King’
A complicated romantic dramedy, a cat and mouse thriller involving art forgery, and a slice of life epic from the South make up the titles in the latest dispatch from the 2025 SXSW Film Festival. The Threesome, Forge, and The Rivals of Amziah King make up three of the films found within the Narrative Spotlight section and showcase the wide ranging films selected for this portion of the festival lineup. Within just these three titles, you can get a taste of what this section of the program can be like when coming to the festival, as each film is a blind chance of seeing something that could be the next great film from an emerging filmmaker or another standard film to add to an existing genre. It’s a chance for discovery, and with one of the film’s below, it’s the chance to see something truly special.
The Threesome (Dir. Chad Hartigan)
For Connor (Jonah Hauer-King), the only girl in the world that matters to him is Olivia (Zoey Deutch). Once co-workers at a small Arkansas bar, Connor has flirted with Olivia on and off for the last couple of years, trying to re-spark the flame that landed them a one-night stand that he can’t get out of his head. She’s the girl of his dreams, and Olivia likes him just enough to be friends, but not rule out the possibility of their relationship growing into something more. While out one night, Connor meets Jenny (Ruby Cruz) and starts to flirt with her, making small talk, getting to know someone beyond Olivia, and comes to find that Jenny is a really sweet person but doesn’t have a lot of friends. Olivia, seeing the two connecting from across the room, comes over and joins in on the conversation, which leads the three of them to go out for a night of partying, leading them back to Connor’s place where the three of them have sex. But director Chad Hartigan’s film isn’t interested in the sexual components that come with having a threesome. He, alongside debut screenwriter Ethan Ogilby, instead focuses on the emotional, personal ramifications attached to the aftermath of doing a spontaneous act like this.
After their threesome, we quickly find out that Connor has gotten both Olivia and Jenny pregnant, leading him to have to juggle his personal feelings for Olivia and his new fondness for Jenny while trying to be there for each of the women carrying his child. It’s an interesting twist on a story we’ve seen, but it just doesn’t tonally land the right balance for the subject matter, not knowing whether it wants to be a dark comedy or a serious romantic drama. Even beyond the tonal and pacing issues within the film, the characters are written the exact same way (a screenwriting 101 issue). They are all sad, lonely, insecure people that don’t have their life in order, and because they want to keep what happened the night of the threesome a secret, their actions build and build to hurting each other, and this happens multiple times throughout the film; mostly to Connor, as he has to juggle to very different situations at once. Hauer-King, Deutch, and Cruz give the material their best shot but are let down by unflattering archetypes of broken people in a screenplay that they can’t elevate beyond the page, leaving The Threesome a repetitive, flaccid exercise.
Grade: C-
The Threesome is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
Forge (Dir. Jing Ai Ng)
In a rundown motel in Miami, Florida, Sandy Baker (T.R. Knight), an online art-appraiser, meets Coco Zhang (Andie Ju), a young woman with a rare painting that she is looking to sell for cash. It was a gift left to her by her aunt, but she wants to see if what she inherited was worth anything. Upon his inspection, Baker discovers that the young woman is carrying a rare piece of art, valued to him at a hundred-thousand dollars. Without telling her this information, he offers her twenty thousand for the painting, and after thinking about it for a second, she accepts the offer. But just as he was lying to her, she was doing the same to him, as the painting is a forgery created by Coco, and is something she has done, alongside the help of her brother Raymond (Brandon Soo Hoo). After both of them dropped out of college, they went into business together, forging documents, passports, and paintings, and doing so while hiding this information from their family. They’ve made a name for themselves as trustworthy forgers, able to get things past most verification processes for most of the art they’ve made in the United States. When they are presented a chance of recreating over two dozen rare, American art pieces for Holden Beaumont (Edmund Donovan), a high profile business man that’s family is loaded with old money, Coco and Raymond see this as a chance to pull off one last big job before they have enough to stop forging for the rest of their lives.
In her directorial debut, director Jing Ai Ng forms Forge into a sleek thriller about the art of forging work, and uses the racial, class dynamics of South Florida to her advantage to make the audience understand why doing this line of work is not just a skill the siblings picked up, but a means for survival. While this new deal is going on, FBI agent Emily Lee (Kelly Marie Tran) is in pursuit of finding the local forgers, with the siblings’ work costing buyers hundreds of thousands of dollars when going up on the open market. Forge feels like a mix of Out of Sight and To Live and Die in L.A. (with a painting sequence in the film that was directly inspired by the money scene with Willem Dafoe, as noted by the director Jing Ai Ng in the Q&A following the screening), while also patiently carving its own voice within a high stakes world of art and deception. The only problem with Forgre is how quickly it wraps up, antithetical to the rest of the film, which feels like someone taking their time with their canvas to build something so distinctly their own.
Grade: B
Forge is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
The Rivals of Amziah King (Dir. Andrew Patterson)
In a small Oklahoma town, on a Friday night at the local drive in, we see Amziah King (Matthew McConaughey) and his friends (Owen Teague, Scott Shepherd, Rob Morgan) roll up with the musical instruments and start performing folk music as the townspeople pull up and start to order their chicken-fried steak sandwiches and sit back to listen to some homegrown, folk tunes. This is the vibe writer-director Andrew Patterson wants you to get in for his follow-up film to The Vast of Night; he wants to build you a world that is wrapped within comfort, community, tradition, love, music, culture, laughter, and nature. Amziah is a local beekeeper, renowned for the type of rare honey his bees make and trusted for his methods of keeping everyone in his small town safe. When twelve drums of honey are found by the police on the side of the road in the back of an abandoned truck, the cops come to him to ask for his assistance in finding whose honey it was that was stolen, and who the honey really belongs to. In a hilarious scene involving Tony Revolori and Jake Horowitz and the process of how Amziah and his team take the wax out of the honey to find their information the cops need for their investigation, Patterson is able to give the veteran actor the runway to create a larger than life character that showcases why he one of the best actors working today. In his first on-camera role in close to six years, McConaughey delivers one of the best performances of his career and his best work in over a decade.
After coming home from the hospital because of a minor heart condition, he runs into Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass), a young girl Amziah and his wife took care of alongside her brothers years ago when she was in foster care. Kateri’s mother just died and she returned to the only place she ever felt safe, surrounded by Amziah and his warmth as a caretaker who trusted her to help him with his business years ago. They slowly start making their way back into each other’s lives, as they go to potlucks together, gigs with his band of friends, and help with the bees in the secret locations Amziah keeps his bees. Their bond becomes tight again, like time had never passed, looking beyond the years of separation from each other, and accepting that life and fate put them back together when they needed each other the most. LookingGlass is a revelation alongside McConaughey, and their chemistry is the foundation that makes The Rivals of Amziah King work. It’s a balancing act pulled off to perfection because if you can buy into their reconnection, then you can buy into her search for justice in the second half of the film when Amziah’s bees are taken and she has to seek justice the only way she knows how; in the shadows, unannounced, with a smile on her face. She becomes a queen bee right before our eyes, and shows that Amziah’s lessons are more than just moral code or a way of life, but are necessary measures to ensure that if someone takes from you, you have to do what you can in your own way to protect those you love.
Patterson, in making the second act turn darker than the more relaxed, celebratory tone of the first act, builds tension that is crackling with fascinating moral decision making by its characters; thus turning his local hangout movie into a revenge western. One is reminded of Carl Franklin’s One False Move, a similar tale of morality that fully commits to the dark thoughts and intentions of the world created, and doesn’t allow its characters to take the easy way out in order to wrap things up neatly. The film’s impeccable ensemble (also featuring a villainous Kurt Russell) is only matched by the ethereal cinematography by M.I. Littin-Menz, and incredibly catchy original music by Erick Alexander and Jared Bulmer, performed by the actors throughout. Bringing all of this together is Andrew Patterson, who spent seven years crafting this project, only to watch it come together perfectly, and announce himself as a serious name to be reckoned with in the world of cinematic storytelling. Patterson has stepped up his game in every way from his debut film and created one of the best films of the year so far.
Grade: A-
The Rivals of Amziah King is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
- SXSW 2025 Reviews: ‘The Threesome,’ ‘Forge,’ ‘The Rivals of Amziah King’ - March 12, 2025
- SXSW 2025 Reviews: ‘Another Simple Favor,’ Death of a Unicorn,’ ‘The Accountant 2’ - March 10, 2025
- Director Watch Podcast Ep. 88 – ‘Primary Colors’ (Mike Nichols, 1998) with Special Guest Ben Miller - March 7, 2025
SXSW 2025 Reviews: ‘The Threesome,’ ‘Forge,’ ‘The Rivals of Amziah King’ 
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