- Prime Video’s “Jury Duty” Acquits Itself Nicely With Its Followup, “Company Retreat” (March 19, 2026)
2023’s “Jury Duty” was one of TV’s most pleasant surprises that year—tucked away on Amazon’s now-defunct ad-supported streamer, Freevee, it was a curious blend of courtroom drama, reality TV, and prank show that positioned an unsuspecting subject (in that season’s case, mild-mannered juror Ronald Gladden) in the middle of a fake scenario (a court case) and surrounded him entirely with actors playing characters. Gags and plot developments were meticulously planned around him, an entire “Truman Show” ecosystem designed purely to befuddle one ordinary man who didn’t know he was in the middle of a semi-improvised sitcom.
For all its flaws, “Jury Duty” worked like gangbusters, so naturally a second season comes quick on its heels. The problem is, you have to start from scratch; Ronald knows the score, and a second court case would just be treading familiar ground. So showrunners Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, veterans of “The Office,” head back to terra firma by setting this season’s scenario not in a courtroom, but a cozy “Company Retreat” for a fictional company. And wouldn’t you know it, it might be better than the first?
The upgrade “Company Retreat” represents is one of refinement, as Eisenberg, Stupnitsky, and director Jake Szymanski (“Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates”) hone in on the elements that made the first season work so well, while jettisoning or downplaying what didn’t. This time, we’re treated to the week-long corporate retreat of Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauce, a fictional family business whose patriarch, Doug (Jerry Hauck), plans to retire and leave the biz to his stoner failson Dougie (Alex Bonifer), who it won’t surprise you to learn just returned from a years-long stint in Jamaica, with all the patois to go with it. (He’s like if Wyatt Koch was also Ras Trent.)
Dougie Jr. (Alex Bonifer), Doug (Jerry Hauck), Anthony
Enter Anthony Norman, our mark, a gregarious young man with a brilliant smile and an eager-to-please nature who’s thrilled to be joining the company as a temporary assistant for the company’s HR head, the deeply corny Kevin (Ryan Perez), who dons a captain’s hat Day One and declares himself “Captain Fun” at the upstate ranch where they’ll be retreating. But when Kevin gets embarrassed by a botched proposal to fellow employee Amy (Emily Pendergast) and flees the ranch, Anthony suddenly gets promoted to Captain Fun. More than a fly on the wall, he’s fully incorporated into this little company family, one awkward interaction at a time, and finds himself in the middle of a David-and-Goliath story to save his scrappy small business from being sold to a soulless corporation (seemingly staffed entirely by redheads).
And this is where “Company Retreat”‘s protagonist sets himself apart from “Jury Duty”‘s funny, but reserved, Ronald: He jumps into the role headfirst. The first season leaned on its out-there cast of characters, led by movie star James Marsden as a preening fictionalized version of himself, to carry their “hero” through the season. And granted, “Company Retreat” has its fair share of endearing oddballs, whether it’s Jim Woods’ warehouse manager Jimmy, who’s got a lot of white guilt in his past to overcome, or Rachel Kaly’s disaffected work-from-home employee Claire, who’ll power through a crab allergy because she just loves it so damn much.
But whether it’s the company setting or just their subject’s innate charisma and extroversion, “Company Retreat” actually manages to make Anthony feel like a protagonist rather than a straight-man outsider. Anthony takes charge, invests deeply in the constructed characters around him, and unwittingly makes himself an integral part of this fake company. He rolls with every curveball the show throws at him, whether it’s a frenzied room-search for a box of stolen Cool Ranch Doritos or a climactic race to stop Doug from signing his company away. (Late in the show, he delivers a rousing speech to save the business that, ironically, you could NOT write. It’s enough to drive you to tears.)
Kate (Erica Hernandez), Claire (Rachel Kaly), PJ (Marc-Sully Saint-Fleur), Kevin (Ryan Perez), Jackie (LaNisa Frederick)
It helps, of course, that the show never feels like it’s poking fun at Anthony directly or making him look the fool. There’s a deep well of empathy running through both seasons of “Jury Duty,” where the subjects are faced with outlandish scenarios and receive them with, frankly, admirable grace. Watch Anthony’s restraint at figuring out that one employee has been drinking from what he thought was a large water bottle but was, in fact, a Fleshlight, or the way he leans in to a group watch of an episode of “Bones” at one employee’s insistence. “I feel like I’m on a TV show, but this is not something that you can just make up,” Anthony says early on; it’s so ridiculous, in fact, that he simply must accept them as reality and navigate it as best he can.
And that, of course, is the thorny dilemma that lies under the “Jury Duty” premise: What are the ethics of deceiving someone this thoroughly for weeks on end? Especially when, unlike last season, this is someone who’s been told he’s been gainfully employed, only to find out the company he thinks he’s saved, and the friends he’s made, were never real? As with Season 1, we get the required rug-pull, and the finale episode where we see all of the logistical legerdomain necessary to pull off the prank, and it’s as impressive as it is heartwarming. The cast all talk to him about feeling a kinship with Anthony, and he admits as much in return. But can you, when it’s all built on a lie?
But it’s easy to put these niggling ethical questions aside when “Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat” manages to pull off the impossible feat of making lightning strike twice. All while making the subject of its deception look not like a rube, but frankly a saint who brings out the best in everyone around him. And to do that while also delivering some deeply cringe laughs is nothing short of miraculous.
Whole season screened for review. Premieres March 20th on Prime Video.
- A Screenwriter’s Dream—and Nightmare: Drew Goddard on “Project Hail Mary” (March 19, 2026)
Screenwriter Drew Goddard reteamed with “The Martian” author Andy Weir to return to space with “Project Hail Mary.” It stars Ryan Gosling as a teacher-turned astronaut who joins forces with an alien to discover why all the stars except one are dying.
In an interview, Goddard talked about writing dialogue for smart characters, why his favorite scene is one he didn’t write, and what he would ask the alien character if he had the chance.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
How do you translate the dense technical and scientific information into a visual medium with a very limited runtime?
Part of that is just the challenge of any adaptation. I learned early that just wordcount-wise, I’ve got about 5 percent of the words in a screenplay that an average novel has. So, you just know going in that you’re going to have to make some tough calls. And so I tend to just focus on what I emotionally connect to in a novel.
Andy’s work is pretty easy because I connect so strongly with his writing. And I start with the soul of the story, which in this case was the story of two individuals coming together from opposite ends of this galaxy to try to save the universe, and I build from there.
There’s a scene with those two individuals in a small space that recalls Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple.”
We did talk about that! We wanted to embrace the reality of a first-contact situation as much as we could, really play with the small interpersonal details that could happen in a situation like this, and embrace the minutiae of communication, which delighted us.
In some ways, this book is a screenwriter’s nightmare because most of the scenes are between two individuals, one of whom can’t exist in our atmosphere, doesn’t have a face, and speaks in whale songs. You take away all of the methods of communication that would make things simpler for us. Not having eyes is such a huge visual mountain to climb because eyes are so expressive.
Chris Miller and Phil Lord, our directors, and I were all a little scared, but we also realized early that the whole point would be to force our hero, Ryland Grace, to see the world through somebody else’s point of view. It was like forced empathy, as we would describe it.
And as we developed it and made it challenging, the very challenges became the point of the movie.
How did hearing Ryan Gosling deliver some of those lines affect you?
I just described this as a screenwriter’s nightmare. The part of it that’s a screenwriter’s dream is stepping into a Ryan Gosling-led project because he has such a staggering range.
Part of what I loved about the book is that it swings from comedy to drama, from heartbreak to terror. Constantly, we’re switching emotional gears. And not every actor can be comfortable doing that. Whereas Ryan lives in that. You look at his body of work. He is not afraid to go for broad comedy. He’s not afraid to break your heart. He can play terror. He can play suspense. He can play literally anything you want to give him.
Usually, no actors are on the project when I’m writing, but Ryan signed on to the movie before I did. So, for the first time in my career, I was writing without fear. There’s always a part of you when you’re writing for the unknown, where you’re protecting yourself to give you the most options possible. And you end up writing it down the middle.
With Ryan, I knew I didn’t have to do that. I knew I could swing for the fences with every page.
Is it daunting to try to write dialogue for characters who are super smart about science and engineering?
The good news is I have Andy Weir. It’s sort of like my own secret weapon because Andy is much smarter than me. He has much more scientific knowledge than most people I’ve met. So I always knew I wasn’t going to try to outsmart Andy. My job here is actually to capture the way smart people sound. Rather than being smart. That’s sort of freeing.
And I’m comfortable around scientists. I grew up around scientists in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which is Oppenheimer’s town. I’ve just simmered in that broth for a long time. I know what geniuses sound like, and my job is to capture that. And then when I would screw it up, Andy was always there to say, like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, but the smarter way to say it is this way.” So it was very much a collaboration.
The engineering side doesn’t get enough credit. I’m so happy you noticed that, because there’s an engineering mindset where they just don’t take no for an answer. There’s no right or wrong with an engineer. It’s just, “We haven’t figured it out yet.” That is the way they approach any problem. It’s not that they failed to solve it. It’s that they just haven’t solved it yet.
That’s a wonderful way to view both a problem and the world. And you can feel that with Rocky. He is never dissuaded. He’s always coming up with the next thing to try and isn’t afraid of failing at it. And it was exhilarating to live in that space.
You’ve created a non-linear story before, as in “Bad Times at the El Royale.” What does that do for the narrative?
It absolutely was one of the great challenges of the book and the story in general. We jump back in time, sort of between past and present. We played with that a lot, but at the end of the day, the movie largely follows the book’s structure. I do believe the first rule of adaptation is “do no harm,” so if I loved it in the book, I try to make it work in the screenplay.
Part of what I think people will discover as they watch is that they present themselves as sort of standard flashbacks, but as the movie continues, you start to reveal things that are not just the average flashback. They start to reveal things that happen that fundamentally change the present that you’re watching, and that’s part of what made it so exhilarating, honestly. That’s why we decided to keep it that way: we realized, as we got into the last third of the movie, that the juxtaposition between past and present became one thing and led us into really interesting territory.
One scene that was not in the book was the karaoke scene, which adds a lot of poignancy and heart to the story.
It’s a fun thing to be the screenwriter on a movie, and my favorite scene is one I have nothing to do with! But it’s true. We did have a scene, in the flashback, where the potential crew of the Hail Mary is meeting for camaraderie. We call it a calm before the storm scene. In the description, it was “just people are singing karaoke in the background.” We just wanted a chance to show them connecting before things start to go bad.
Chris and Phil started saying, “We should have some of our cast members sing karaoke.” And then that became Ryan hearing Sandra Hüller and saying, “Sandra should sing because she’s an extraordinary singer.” And it really came together in 24 hours before it started being shot. Everyone was sort of gently asking Sandra to please sing, and she picked the song. And now I cannot imagine this movie without that song.
To me, that moment of Sandra singing captures the whole soul of the movie, both what the first half has and what’s to come in the second half. It’s one of those things that if we tried to pick a better song, we wouldn’t have been able to. Sometimes the movie gods just smile on you, and these small things really make the movie transcend. I loved writing [Hüller’s character] Stratt.
Why?
I am a product of women believing in me even when I did not believe in myself. It starts with my mom, who was a schoolteacher for 50 years. It continues through writers like Lucia Berlin, who saw something in me and believed in me, and it continues through studio presidents like Mary Parent, Amy Pascal, and Emma Watts.
I saw a lot of these women in Stratt, Women who are tasked with leading great endeavors and finding a way to do it with compassion, even when the weight of their decisions is greater than any of us could really understand. I think all of that found its way into this movie.
It’s unusual to have a middle school teacher as a hero in a film with a lot of technology and science.
This movie is about teachers saving the universe. I read the book and just immediately fell in love with the idea of a schoolteacher saving the universe. I have a personal connection through my mom, but I just have a deep love for teachers, teaching, and learning. It felt like something that deserves to be celebrated. Quite honestly, I don’t think we can celebrate teachers enough. And if we can do it here with this movie, we have a chance to, at the very least, give them a small piece of the credit they deserve.
When I read the book, I thought to myself, oh, I have to do this. I have to do this for the teachers.
If you had a chance to talk to Rocky, what would you want to ask him?
I would ask him more about his mate. We touch on his mate Adrian, and he lets us know that they’ve been together a very long time, and it’s definitely a side of Rocky I’d like to learn more about, and also about the other Eridians he’s fond of. You can learn a lot about anyone by asking about their loved ones.
- Prime Video’s “Bait” Is An Electrifying Look At The Cost of Fame (March 19, 2026)
Prime’s new series “Bait” opens with its protagonist, Shah Latif (Riz Ahmed), donned in a black tuxedo, hair meticulously styled as he does a screen test for the newest James Bond film. We quickly learn that this cold open, in which Ahmed delivers all the suaveness one could expect from the next actor to inhabit the role, is completely unlike Shah or the rest of the series, as he begins to flub his lines, before pathetically begging the director for a do-over. As he dejectedly leaves the studio, he’s photographed by the paparazzi, which throws him headfirst into stardom and allows him a callback for a re-test, but also puts him directly in the firing line of racist online trolls.
A failed actor up until this point, Shah becomes a household name overnight. While this may cause concern for some, instead, Shah desperately attempts to cling to any sense of notoriety he can. This does not come from a place of ego, rather a desperation to become something and someone, not only for himself, but for his family, friends, and, as Shah tells himself, brown actors everywhere. When a severed pig’s head is thrown through a window in his family, it becomes clear that Shah isn’t the only one in danger from his newfound fame, and it causes his mind, his family, and his career to slowly unravel.
Plunging us headfirst into the existential crisis this ignites, which takes place over a dizzying four days, “Bait” forces its audience to confront not only the heavy price of fame in today’s world, but how this price looks different for specific demographics that try to achieve it. Shah’s desire for fame doesn’t just stem from wanting a gig that pays well; it comes from a desperate desire to belong not only in the acting world but in a United Kingdom that has never fully felt like home to him. If he were to land the role of James Bond, he would have the potential to prove to his parents that he’s more than just another failed actor.
Bait (Prime Video)
But it becomes clear within the show’s second episode that the role of Bond isn’t just a way for him to land a fat check; the role would allow Shah to prove that, despite his race, he has what it takes to play a hero who has defined the country’s pop-cultural landscape for decades.
By forcing Shah to confront his place in the world, Ahmed, who also wrote the series, uses this story as a vehicle to explore how the entertainment industry manipulates identity politics and often chews up its actors of color before quickly spitting them out. His sharp writing is paired with neon lights and dizzying camerawork, all of which combine to make this journey as disorienting as the current modern era is. But, despite its serious subject matter, the show never takes itself too seriously, both poking fun at Shah’s own blatant complacency and the odyssey he finds himself on, which involves chase scenes on train platforms and monologues delivered by the same severed pig’s head that was thrown through the window of his home earlier in the season.
There are lines so disarmingly funny throughout that it’s impossible not to periodically pause the show, like when a rival actor of Shah’s, played by Himesh Patel, is asked if he’s Muslim, to which he replies in earnest, “Aren’t we all?” Unafraid to expose the hypocrisy of the entertainment industry and modern politics, the series never lets Shah get away with his own biases, as his growing paranoia begins to blow up his life even more than the initial reporting of his potential casting did.
Bait (Prime Video)
What results is a fascinating exploration of a man desperate to find recognition in a world that is more comfortable leaving people like him behind. Because of this, we watch as he attempts to conform to the wills of the higher-ups around him, shrinking himself in an attempt to play the role of the perfect child of immigrants.
An engaging mix of “Uncut Gems” and “Fleabag,” Ahmed has crafted a thrilling tale following one of this year’s most fascinating protagonists. He’s even provided himself a vehicle in which he can show off his own acting prowess, which hasn’t been given enough of a chance to shine in recent years.
With only six thirty-minute episodes, the series thankfully never overstays its welcome, forcing its audience to join Shah on this unexpectedly poignant journey to find himself in an industry and country that threatens to swallow people like him whole. A fascinating look at the psychological cost of performing, both on- and off-camera, “Bait” is undeniably one of the funniest and most electrifying shows of the year.
All episodes were screened for review.
- Lisa Kudrow Makes An Extremely Welcome “Comeback” to HBO (March 17, 2026)
In the first two seasons of “The Comeback,” sitcom actress Valerie Cherish was defined by her almost panicked need for publicity. In season one, which debuted in 2005, she was thirsty to reignite her career with a role in a new sitcom, “Room and Bored,” and a foray into the pre-“Real Housewives” era of reality television.
In the second, which arrived in 2014, her desire to stay relevant led her to portray a barely veiled version of herself in an HBO series based on her experience on “Room and Bored.” That project put her in front of the camera in a prestige dramedy for the first time, which obviously outweighed the fact that it forced her to revisit some traumatic experiences that were exaggerated for dramatic, unflattering purposes. That’s because Valerie Cherish’s life mantra consisted of just seven words and an ellipsis: “Attention must be paid … to Valerie Cherish.”
Twelve years later, Valerie is back in a third season of “The Comeback” that, to my deeply pleasant surprise, is the mockumentary’s best. As co-created by Lisa Kudrow, who brilliantly brings Valerie to self-absorbed life, and Michael Patrick King of “Sex and the City” and “And Just Like That…”, these eight episodes play like a time capsule of what it feels like in 2026 to work in Hollywood, or in any creative field, really.
Where the previous two seasons emphasized how desperate Valerie was to get and keep a good job, the third season of “The Comeback” understands that literally everyone in Hollywood is now equally desperate to get and keep a good job. It doesn’t matter if you’re above the line or below it. Everyone can sense that the business is on the verge of hitting an iceberg and doing whatever they must to get their ass into a deck chair, no matter how nonsensically it’s been rearranged.
HBO
Jane (Laura Silverman), the Academy Award-winning filmmaker who produced Valerie’s reality show, also called “The Comeback,” now works at Trader Joe’s to make ends meet, but nevertheless agrees to start shooting behind-the-scenes footage of Valerie again. Sharon, a casting director played by actress and actual casting director Marla Garlin, quite literally trips over herself in a restaurant while trying to ask Valerie if she can get her some work. Even Mark (Damian Young), Valerie’s chill, non-showbiz husband, is currently appearing in a reality show about finance dudes, a gig he took after being dismissed from an actual job in finance. Once upon a time, Valerie Cherish seemed uniquely shameless. Now, having a sense of shame is a luxury that no one can afford.
“I’m just trying to get me and my kids out of this town before it explodes,” a veteran TV writer named Mary (Abbi Jacobson) tells Valerie. Unfortunately, Mary and her husband Josh (John Early) are the showrunners on Valerie’s new streaming sitcom “How’s That?!,” a show that the head of the network (a perfectly blasé Andrew Scott) insists will be scripted by Mary and Josh, with occasional help from artificial intelligence. But A.I., the unabashed villain in season three of “The Comeback,” turns out to be more “in charge” than Valerie anticipates, a fact that she is told to keep secret from the rest of the cast and crew.
That set-up enables King and Kudrow to create some very funny gags—“I’m pretty sure I did this sheriff’s joke way back on ‘Mama’s Family,’” says one of Valerie’s puzzled co-stars upon receiving a new script—and generate moments of genuine drama. “This is an extinction event,” legendary showrunner Jack Stevens (Bradley Whitford) tells Valerie regarding the rise of A.I. That reality is palpable in almost every scene of “The Comeback.” You can practically smell the fear emanating from Valerie and everyone else in her L.A. orbit through your digital device’s connection to HBO Max.
HBO
Of course, Kudrow is still the ringmaster of this studio lot circus; she is, once again, fantastically layered in her portrayal of Valerie, whose persistence feels less like a character flaw in this media landscape and more like a superpower. Valerie is still privileged, self-involved, and obsessed with putting herself out there. But where Valerie seemed like a try-hard striver in previous seasons, those qualities now underline how much of a fighter she is. An often inept fighter, but still: a fighter nonetheless. There’s a set piece in the fourth episode that involves Valerie trying to navigate the Warner Bros. lot in a golf cart while Doechii’s “Anxiety” plays on the soundtrack that ranks right up there with the “Get On Your Feet” ice-skating rink scene from “Parks and Recreation.”
Kudrow is surrounded by an extremely talented cast of familiar regulars, including Young, Silverman, and Dan Bucatinsky as her manager, Billy, but the absence of Robert Michael Morris, who died in 2017, as Valerie’s hair stylist and head cheerleader, Mickey, is certainly felt. (Valerie explains that Mickey died of COVID; in one shot of a dressing room she briefly occupies, there are two photos on her make-up table: one of Mickey and one of Lucille Ball.)
The series also boasts an impressive array of guest stars, including Jacobson, Early, Whitford, Scotts both Andrew and Adam, and James Burrows, the revered sitcom director who worked with Kudrow on “Friends.” He plays a version of himself, a celebrated TV director who advises Valerie that only real, flesh-and-blood writers can make the kind of television audiences will want to watch. “Val, those beautiful, broken souls are what make something great,” he says.
In many ways, “The Comeback” comes across as both a love letter to and a eulogy for the television comedy. It can also been seen as a TV-focused complement to “The Studio,” Seth Rogen’s Apple TV+ series about the insanity of working in the modern movie business, except “The Comeback” does an even better job of reflecting the panicky energy that has become the norm for anyone who makes a living in Los Angeles—or anywhere, for that matter—trying to tell stories. Valerie Cherish has always been panicked. Her default setting has always been “survival mode.” Or as she puts it: “I think you have to agree to be humiliated, and I never signed up.” Both she and this season of “The Comeback” are made for this moment.
All eight episodes were screened for review.
- SXSW 2026: Imposters, Sender, Monitor (March 17, 2026)
Who are we? Why are we doing this? The existential dread hangs thick in the air in several films at this year’s SXSW, reflecting a country that seems increasingly uncertain about its identity. It’s not a coincidence that multiple films this year feature characters for whom reality quite literally fractures, creating impossible situations fraught with thematic tension. Sadly, several of them sacrifice filmmaking in pursuit of an undercooked idea, but I’m happy that young filmmakers are trying to hold a mirror up to where we are through genre film in 2026. It’s long been the best way to see ourselves reflected.
The best of this kind of existential horror in this dispatch is Caleb Phillips’ “Imposters,” starring two people who have done twisty projects like this before in Jessica Rothe (“Happy Death Day”) and Charlie Barnett (“Russian Doll”). They play Marie and Paul, relatively new parents of a baby boy who have moved to an old house that’s pretty far off the grid after Paul was shot in the line of duty. He survived the shooting, but it gave him a new appreciation for life’s randomness, so much so that he’s taken to flipping a coin when he makes major decisions. One of those recent decisions led him to sleep with a co-worker, hinting at trouble in this marriage long before the unthinkable happened.
During a neighborhood block party, Paul puts their baby down for a nap, but he’s not there when Marie checks on him just a couple of minutes later. Of course, panic ensues, and the local cops (led by an always-effective Yul Vazquez) search the area for weeks, but it’s as if the baby just vanished into thin air. The number-one suspect is a local named Orson (Bates Wilder), who has a connection to the house and tells Marie and Paul they can get their baby back if they go into a cave in the woods behind their property. Paul can’t bring himself to do it, certain he will find the body of his child. Marie does, returning with a healthy kid just an hour later. Except maybe that’s not their kid.
With echoes of projects like “Coherence” and “The Endless,” “Imposters” plays with ideas of identity, commitment, randomness, and parenthood, but struggles at times to tie them together in a thematically satisfying way. While the unclosed parentheses of “Imposters” can be forgivable (and often even preferable in an era when too many genre films over-explain), my biggest issues come with the look of the film, one that’s too clean, too sterile, almost too commercial. This is a film that lacks texture, grit, and reality, too often feeling like actors on a set. The cave doesn’t even look dirty enough.
Having said that, it’s a film rich with ideas, and its two leads never falter. Barnett understands a man who was already struggling to figure out what he wanted and who he was before the impossible clarified his inadequacies; Rothe has always been a deeply present and engaged performer. Some will fall for “Imposters,” and I won’t blame them, even if I long for a few tweaks in the version of this project that exists through the other side of the cave.
Another film with a confident actress performance arguably undone by some filmmaking choices is Russell Goldman’s abrasive “Sender,” a movie that sometimes feels like a cinematic anxiety attack. Goldman introduced the film at SXSW by revealing that it emerged from a time he opened a package at his door to find shin guards he never ordered. Why were they there? Who sent them? And what could their presence in his space mean? He takes this idea of almost-cursed objects being sent to someone who never wanted them to extremes in this genre experiment, a movie about a woman being crushed by the world of online retail. Aren’t we all?
“Severance” star Britt Lower is excellent as Julia, a recovering alcoholic in Santa Clarita who begins receiving unsolicited packages from a delivery man played by the great David Dastmalchian. More packages from a company called “Smirk” (an Amazon stand-in right down to box and logo design) keep arriving at Julia’s door. At first, they seem relatively harmless and random. Protein powder? Cymbals? But some of the packages start to feel personally targeted, like a blender meant to replace the one Julia used to make drinks. And why is there a masked man in her cul-de-sac? Her paranoia rises with the packages, then reaches another level when she finds reviews of these products on the Smirk site attributed to her. She didn’t write them.
The idea that a vulnerable woman could get caught up in an existential version of online retail, becoming part of an influencer/shopper system she never wanted to be part of, is a great one. Think of the data libraries out there of everything you’ve bought, and what a system could know about you through them. We gave up so much of our privacy years ago, and that’s one of many themes of a film that’s partially about how the product pipeline has dehumanized us all.
The problem is that too many of Goldman’s choices as a director seem to actively be working against what Lower brings to his interesting script. The loudest and most hyperactive film I saw at SXSW (and might see all year), “Sender” is cut to death, edited so frenetically that it becomes abrasive instead of panic-inducing, and given a score that’s meant to rattle but too often annoys. The aesthetic approach was clearly to use craft to amplify Julia’s decline, but it has the opposite effect, constantly reminding us of itself, turning Julia’s story into one that’s too hard to hear through the noise.
My issues with the craft of “Sender” are amplified tenfold in the frustrating “Monitor,” a film that wades into the increasingly crowded genre of how the internet is going to kill us, but with too little thematic exploration or impressive craft. A hybrid of “American Sweatshop” and “Slender Man,” it loosely suggests that our obsession with the ugliness of what we see online will be the end of us. In this case, it’s a Tulpa, a demonic entity that comes to life through online monitors and projections, able to kill anything that has looked into its digital eyes. It makes for a few interesting set pieces wherein the villain of the piece can only be deadly if its victim is being recorded by something, but it’s an idea of a new kind of boogeyman that isn’t embedded into a film that feels like it’s doing enough with its loose themes and thin characters.
“Monitor” is led by Brittany O’Grady (“The White Lotus”) as Maggie, an online monitor who works for a shady video company like YouTube or TikTok. She has to watch the worst of the worst and decide whether to reject or upload submitted clips. It’s clearly draining the souls of her and her co-workers to look at truly awful clips all day in the basement of an office building, but their jobs get much worse when Maggie rejects a creepy clip of a shadowy figure coming toward the camera and staring into it. She gets a message insisting she reverse course. And then people start dying.
Chief among my issues with “Monitor” is that the film falls into that common genre hole of recent years in which you want to yell at someone to turn on a light. Yes, the low lighting is meant to reflect a group of people who basically live their lives underground to protect us from internet demons, but it has so little texture and range that it ends up washing out the entire film. A movie can be shadowy and dark without looking flat and drained of color. It’s hard to even see what’s happening sometimes in “Monitor,” which sometimes feels intentional to contrast against the bright lights of the projected monitors that give this film’s villain life, but also just looks awful.
I couldn’t get past the drained aesthetics of “Monitor” to appreciate what it was trying to do, but that does feel like an aspect that directors Matt Black and Ryan Polly could easily rectify with a future project. Like so many genre films screened at festivals, “Monitor” is one of those projects that doesn’t live up to its potential, but offers just enough conceptual hope to make me curious about what the filmmakers do next.
