East Coast Premiere

Filmmaker Annapurna Sriram and Actor Sadie Scott in Person

Someone has placed a curse on AP (Sriram), and it’s fucking up her vibe. She visits several local psychics who all recommend an expensive ritual costing $1000 in which AP must sacrifice an adorable baby lamb for the curse to be lifted. As she scooters around Trashtown gathering funds, AP experiences increasingly absurd encounters with the town’s outrageous denizens. Her profession as a call girl grants her access to wild parties, copious drugs, and cash in hand, but the constant hustle has diminished her sunny disposition. A reunion with a fellow prostitute Danni (Scott) finds AP with a partner-in-crime to sojourn with through Trashtown’s dark underbelly, edging toward the inevitable sacrifice that will free her.

Fucktoys reimagines the Fool’s Journey in a sweltering landscape juxtaposing derelict structures and steamy wetlands with the upscale abodes of the city’s pervy elite. Lensed in 16mm by cinematographer Cory Fraiman-Lott, the story unfolds like a fevered wet dream, saturating the viewer with moist, horny, anarchic images of writhing, throbbing, and ejaculating bodies captured in sumptuous visual splendor. The dream-like quality coupled with the film’s lofty themes urges the raucous trashiness into the realms of transgressive art. The story’s employment of Tarot and occult divination offers an intriguing framework to incite the personal growth and transformation longed for by its protagonist amid the permeating filth.

Aimed to hit between high camp and meaningful discourse, Sriram takes huge creative gambles  as a director and performer. She effectively harnesses an untapped era of 60s and 70s sexploitation cinema found in the adventurous (often feminist leaning) work of filmmakers like Doris Wishman, Radley Metzger, and Russ Meyer, if they’d conspired with John Waters for a grimy trash aesthetic. The director uses the sex trade as a means of exploring intersectional issues of class, race, gender, intimacy, as well as the exploitation of sex workers. In between floppy dildos and sloppy blowjobs are moments of sublime tenderness and vulnerability that signify a humanist intent. Throughout the film’s risque presentation, Sriram teases us with a motif of holes–images of tires, donuts, mouths, and other round openings signifying a plethora of orifices available for insertion, inviting us to fill the dark crevices with our own wants and desires.

– Chris Hallock

Brattle Passes not accepted.