SXSW 2026 Reviews: ‘Sender,’ ‘The Saviors,’ ‘Hokum’ Highlight the Stars of ‘Severance’

A clear theme emerged out of a few movies from this year’s SXSW film line-up: Severance. Specifically, Britt Lower and Adam Scott, who topline the hit Apple TV+ sci-fi drama together, and are both featured in genre-focused psychological thrillers within the Narrative Spotlight and Midnighters sections of the programming. I had somewhat mixed reactions to all of them, but it’s nice to see each of them leveraging that Severance goodwill to get some original projects made by debut and cult favorite filmmakers. 

Sender (Dir. Russell Goldman)

Debut writer-director Russell Goldman has the claustrophobic paranoia of modern living on his mind in his new feature, Sender. In it, he sticks Britt Lower into a suffocating prison of her own home and mind when she begins receiving mounds and mounds of packages she never ordered from the Amazon analogue Smirk. The ubiquity of packages from mass-shipping e-commerce giants, familiar to everyone, takes an even more sinister turn as Lower’s Julia works to unravel a conspiracy at the heart of why she might be the target.

The events of Sender swirl around the neurotic subjectivity of Julia’s slipping mental state. Editor Marco Rosas employs an elliptical cutting style that creates an oscillation between past and present, reality and something just a touch beyond. The core mystery of locating the source of the perpetual deluge of mail is given some extraneous signifiers that gesture toward a more plot-forward procedural, but mostly serves as a catalyst for expressionistic psychological probing of a woman in a state of severe suspicion and withdrawal — Julia is also newly sober and facing pressure from herself and those in her life, like her sister played by Anna Baryshnikov, to avoid relapsing.

Baryshnikov comes and goes from the film at will, like the rest of the cast, with faces popping up sporadically for relatively brief intervals as we take a break from wrestling with Julia’s mania-induced solitude. These include a Smirk delivery driver played by David Dastmalchian, Rhea Seehorn as a connection at an AA meeting, Jamie Lee Curtis as another scam victim connected to the plot, Utkarsh Ambudkar as an old co-worker and former fling, and Mike Mitchell as an abandoned potential love interest. This rotating crop of characters is oblique yet present enough to have some connection to the greater conspiracy. Some of those threads do tie up, while most are meant to complicate further the snarls of Julia’s confusion in their brief appearances.

That’s to say that Sender is carried directly on the back of Lower’s film-sustaining performance. Every scene is hers, and she unabashedly plunges into the cerebral depths the script requires of her, with Julia often haggard and hollow-eyed as she exhausts every avenue of investigation. Without Lower, Sender falls apart; with her, it’s merely unsatisfying. Goldman is never all that interested in building the traditional tension you’d expect from the premise, and therefore the ultimate answer feels undercooked and abrupt. That may not be a problem if Julia’s interior torment had a more cathartic destination, but the surreal style of progression and cutting overstays its welcome in the back half, as the hallucinatory threads become increasingly difficult to hold on to. Sender is an enticing experiment in a vacuum, but its attempt at a deep understanding of its subject’s brain accidentally shuts the audience out entirely.

Grade: C

The Saviors (Dir. Kevin Hamedani)

It’s the start of a double feature with Adam Scott, kicking off with The Saviors, a darkly comic social-satire mystery screening at an uncomfortably fitting moment in international geopolitics. As Americans follow news of the government’s reckless war in Iran, tracking what new incidents of mass violence are occurring abroad or potentially at home if you heed the administration, SXSW attendees are sitting down to watch a film all about the xenophobic paranoia of suspecting what our Muslim neighbors are up to behind closed doors.

Co-writers Travis Betz and Kevin Hamedani (with Hamedani directing) don’t feel the need to assuage well-meaning liberal guilt. The leading distrustful pair is Sean (Scott) and Kim (Danielle Deadwyler), seemingly well-to-do suburban progressives facing financial and marital troubles that further spur Sean to action amid his languishing circumstances — he’s out of a job, and the couple is all but officially divorced. They rent out their garage as a makeshift guest house to keep up on the mortgage. The newest occupiers are the amenable Amir (Theo Rossi) and the deaf Jahan (Nazanin Boniadi), siblings that Sean and Kim want to believe they’re above stereotyping, yet about whom they already harbor preconceived notions, even before they begin to suspect the two could be building a bomb to annihilate the soon-to-visit president in a mass extremist attack.

Betz and Hamedani aren’t subtle in amassing nuggets of commentary to build the scenario’s tension, but these aren’t subtle times. Sean comes from a conservative family — his parents, played by Ron Perlman and Colleen Camp, subscribe to a propagandistic alt-right newsletter, as we learn in their single shared scene — and his sister Cleo (Kate Berlant) insists that liberalism is out of fashion and conservatism is cool now, inserting herself deeper into the investigation as the film progresses. Meanwhile, news reports speak of ever-escalating rumors of radical terrorist violence, while Sean dreams of an apocalyptic wasteland of a future as the film broadens its genre ambitions.

And the film does make a late turn. To name the iconic series that The Saviors most closely recall may spoil too much of what’s going on beneath the surface and elements the filmmakers would rather keep subdued. But it always seeks to ground itself in the sociopolitical reality of its characters, humorously prodding at the prejudices and hypocrisies of American race relations, especially beliefs held by those who think they’ve morally absolved themselves of any wrongdoing. Whether it earns the boldness of its final moments is another matter. Those political threads are intermingled with the escalating events, but they never feel like they pay off satisfyingly, leaving the ending grasping for greater intensity as the mystery starts to lag in the back half. The script’s heavy-handed messaging about our collective need to communicate eventually betrays both the film’s core tension and the audience’s intelligence. Once it begins to spell itself out, it never feels the need to stop. The Saviors has a handle on the core anxieties of our current relationships to one another, but the conceptual gamble it takes in sustaining that distress undercuts its own insights.

Grade: B-

Hokum (Dir. Damian McCarthy)

My preferred Adam Scott vehicle of the fest, and the best film of this dispatch, comes from rising horror luminary Damian McCarthy. He builds on the creeping dread of his first two features, Caveat and Oddity, with Hokum, which sends Adam Scott to Ireland on a personal sojourn to quell long-festering grief tied to his parents. This being a McCarthy film, he ultimately ends up being stalked and haunted in the eerie corners of the old, rural hotel where he takes up residence for a week.

A pretentious, self-loathing, yet thoroughly depressed famous novelist, Scott’s Ohm Bauman is an acidic presence to the Irish locals trying to accommodate him, taking out his frustrations on everyone from support staff like Fiona (Florence Ordesh) to the timid bellboy Alby (Will O’Connell). The only person Ohm seems to mildly tolerate is the local van-in-the-woods-living crackpot, Jerry (David Wilmot), who becomes a key ally in the intrigue soon to follow. Things escalate quickly: Fiona ends up missing, and the local police and hotel staff suspect Jerry. But Jerry has another theory — she’s in the abandoned, locked-up honeymoon suite on the upper floor, off-limits and feared to be haunted by a witch. Jerry’s going to check it out, and Ohm is going with him.

What happens next is as much a product of Ohm’s lingering trauma as it is a supernatural haunting. Arthouse horror fans will be familiar with the form of brutal therapy that the sinister happenings within the hotel’s walls double as a metaphor for, but that doesn’t stop McCarthy from having wicked, mischievous fun putting his audience on edge. Hokum doesn’t aim for blood-curdling terror — it’s more like a sustained creep factor that inhabits the frame as Ohm navigates his claustrophobic situation. McCarthy’s camera is ruthless in playing with the viewer, lingering on deep expanses of pitch blackness, with sound design that highlights the ghostly wailing and moans of a mysterious presence. The production design by Til Frohlich is also of note. Watching Adam Scott scuttle around the derelict shambles of the hotel evokes the isolating, oppressive atmosphere of playing Silent Hill, down to the crackling voice recorder in Ohm’s possession.

Where the film falters is in its overall buildup and its integration of Irish folklore. Hokum always feels like it’s leading to something more substantial in its preternatural subject matter, but the material mostly serves as set dressing for the scares. The recurring appearance of a book on Irish folklore suggests a greater focus on ideas that never culminate in something all that rewarding. The emphasis is more on Ohm’s inner journey, which is now bog-standard in modern horror. That said, even if his film is dramatically familiar, McCarthy is a first-rate architect of sustained nail-biting tension and the kind of macabre imagery that tends to flash through your brain in the middle of the night. Hokum prioritizes its scares, and it’s memorable in that simple dedication.

Grade: B

These reviews are from the 2026 SXSW Film Festival.