Double Feature: Fucktoys and Wasteman Reviews

Sadly, the 2025 Oscar season is now over! It is a season that ended with an exciting tie in Best Live Action shorts, with 4 worthy winners across the 3 shorts categories in Two People Exchanging Saliva, The Singers, The Girl Who Cried Pearls and All The Empty Rooms. Before the 2026 season picks up with coverage of the spring and summer festivals we have been taking a bit of a break from shorts coverage in order to be ready to go for the new season. Thank you to each of our readers for your support throughout the past year.

In the meantime, our writer Pedro Lima and guest writer Kevin Ward wanted to post reviews of a couple of features from two very talented and special up-and-coming directors. Although we almost exclusively cover shorts, we also have a passion for new film makers to the scene and independent cinema in general. These two films were put on our radar from awards season this year with Wasteman being nominated for Outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer at the BAFTAs and Fucktoys' Annapurna Sriram receiving a nomination for the Someone to Watch award at the Film Independent Spirit Awards.

Wasteman has already hit VOD in the UK and is playing in theatres across North America starting April 17th. Fucktoys is still playing shows across the world from Portland to Milwaukee to Palm Springs to Canada, Finalnd, Austria and Mexico. We highly recommend you check to see if it is playing a show near you. With that said, here are our reviews of these two incredible debuts.

Fucktoys, dir. Annapurna Sriram

In the history of filmmaking, genre cinema is a crucial tool to unveil the director's point of view on a specific theme. After the lifting of the Hays Code in the 1960s, the American independent landscape welcomed the creativity of artists to criticize the situation of the American society. A post-war generation, both the Second Great War and the Korean conflict, was preparing to butcher a new generation in Vietnam. Hence, action films analyzed the criminality of the Urban centers, while horror films would use subversive violence to exorcise the fears of the country. Sixty years later, the political environment might sound familiar: wars across the globe funded by the United States, while a young generation sinks into social problems and economic despair. Still, the modern picture of the 2020s filmmaking is the one dominated by the conglomerates, pumping slops engineered to gross a billion dollars and sell tons in toys and merchandise. Yet, following its SXSW premiere last year, Fucktoys by Annapurna Sriram illustrates a new form of cinematic creation. 

Transposing the agonies of the Gen Z, Sriram creates a parallel world that follows the suffering of a sex worker, AP (portrayed by the director), who works as an escort. Suddenly, she finds out that she contracted a curse, and the only way to break it is by paying a thousand dollars to a psychic. Hence, she and her best friend, Danni (Sadie Scott), hustle around Trashtown, USA, to raise the thousand dollars, while they face perverts, violence, and a decaying American society. At first, the film by Sriram sounds like a work that follows an obvious path: a cursed sex worker raises money, and then breaks the curse. Yet, the director/screenwriter/actor flips the conventions by addressing a perversion that symbolizes the constant danger. Therefore, the film unveils to us a society where each of the individuals seeks sexual pleasure to fulfill their inner necessities. A relationship with a client who searches for comfort in the fetish and sex, and a worker who needs the money to break the curse and avoid the worst. 

Consequently, the director creates a world that feels so lively and fast-paced. There is a constant necessity to hustle, get what you need, and make money, while they sleep underneath the sky in a bed in a distant place that looks like a garden. In this context, AP needs sex work to survive, monetarily and spiritually, submitting herself to pathetic men, frustrated husbands (played by The Comeback star, Damian Young), and superstars who need to hide their fetishes not to reveal their real selves to the public. Shot on 16mm, the director aims for a dirty and gnarly look that feels both dystopian and utterly realistic. The sex rooms are dirty, similar to slaughterhouses, where sex and violence lie on a thin line. AP's partner in crime (literally) is the definition of the sidekick who does the dirty job, including the failed superstar, and the violence of that environment. 

Throughout the mix of witchcraft film, sexual comedy, and action B-movie, Annapurna Sriram crafts a portrayal of our time: sexy, diverse, and decaying. The action stars are a brown queer woman and a badass non-binary person who ought to hustle to break a curse, which becomes a brilliant metaphor for our late-stage capitalism. The minorities here are in the margins, rushing to break the curse, but haven't they been fighting since the inception of humanity? In the end, fucktoys feels bleak despite its colorful and pulpy reality. Yet, it comments on the current political and societal landscape of America properly, a miserable reality disguised as colorful and great (again). 

Review by: Pedro Lima

Wasteman, dir. Cal McMau

Wasteman follows Taylor (David Jonsson), an inmate at a UK penitentiary. Though Taylor is prepared for a long haul, recent changes in the law put him on the verge of a conditional release if he can just stay out of trouble for a week or so. Jonsson brings a quiet demeanor and timid presence that fit the role perfectly. He plays a man who is terrified of jeopardizing his chance at freedom, and you can feel every bit of that fear in the way he moves through each day. When Tom Blyth enters as his new cellmate, Dee, that fragile calm evaporates. The wild look in Dee’s eye is unmistakable. Even when he extends pleasantries and doesn’t seem like an outright adversary, there is something in him that reads as danger, and it is immediately clear that his presence is going to pose a massive threat to the potential of Taylor’s release. Jonsson and Blyth’s scenes together lock the film into a constant state of unease, and the tension never really loosens. You can tell instantly that Dee is someone Taylor should be very fearful of, and not just because of the physical threat he could pose, which he does. Dee’s volatility hangs over every moment, and even when it isn’t aimed directly at Taylor, it feels like one sudden shift could snap his hopes of ever seeing his son again.

While I love that kind of tension, the kind that keeps you on the edge of your seat, the world built around these two men can feel a little less convincing. It is not the most realistic depiction of prison life, as the prisoners seem to have an unlimited supply of contraband, drugs, knives…everything. The idea of receiving deliveries to their window via drones feels particularly far fetched. And while I love the wildcard energy Blyth brings, the film never gives Dee much shape beyond that. There’s no sense of how he ended up here, no scraps of a backstory, nor even a self‑mythology he might spin to make himself larger than life. Taylor isn’t much more developed, with the film mostly relying on (the voice of) his son, Adam, and his strained relationship with Adam’s mother to merely suggest who Taylor is outside these walls. For all the things that don’t quite add up, the film still works because the core relationship tension is so strong. Taylor and Dee create a pressure that never really fades, and that force is enough to carry the film past its weaker spots.

Review by: Kevin Ward