Consumerism Terrifies in Hypnotic, Hallucinatory ‘Sender’ [Chattanooga Review]
Consumerism is going to kill us all. In Sender, it poses the biggest threat to Britt Lower’s Julia, the victim of a suspected scam in which dozens of packages arrive at her front door daily. She didn’t order any of them, and they’re bizarrely, menacingly personal. So, too, is Russell Goldman’s feature adaptation of his short, “Return to Sender.” This is disorienting horror for disorienting times.
Goldman’s pointed, hypnotic interrogation of lives in recovery teetering over the brink doesn’t give Julia any room to breathe. From the outset (after a brief Jamie Lee Curtis cameo), her life is in shambles. On the ostensible road to recovery after she’s been fired and quit drinking, Julia is keener on glossing her life up with Smirk (er… Amazon) packages, giggling through her first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, much to the dismay of Whitney (Rhea Seehorn, excellent).
She posits Whitney might make a good sponsor, though she’s quick to decline the offer, and Julia instead pivots toward striking up a too-casual relationship with her regular Smirk driver, Charlie (David Dastmalchian in fortified creep mode), and irritating the crud out of her sister, Tatiana (Anna Baryshnikov), overbearing in her quest to help Julia back on her feet.
The packages, at first intended to help Julia rebuild her new life, soon arrive in greater volume and with a more insidious intent. Lipstick, protein powder, creepy masks and a drum set – all, through hazy, flared flashbacks, suggest some connection to Julia’s alcohol-fueled and destructive past. Curtis, whose brief role shares thematic currency with Julia’s, augments the e-commerce context as a woman who took her own life after a similar scam.
While at first a mystery whodunnit, or who-sent-it, Goldman is less interested in the why than the how. Julia’s spiral into psychosis is augmented by accusive customer service workers and dead coyotes. Her loosening grip on reality is too easy to identify with, and Lower sells the hell out of it, remaining both sympathetic and intriguing as her world crumbles around her, seeking refuge in fully clothed showers and dead-end e-commerce jobs.
That all sounds more coherent than Sender often is, though that’s largely the point. There’s a conventional A-to-B narrative here, though the diegesis is off-kilter, indicative of Julia’s mind, as she navigates a world that’s innately hostile toward her existence. The uniformly excellent cast is almost human, but not quite, as artificial and fleeting as the many (many) next-day deliveries arriving courtesy of Smirk.
The hypnosis is direct, triggering a kind of dreamscape (or nightmare) neither Julia nor the audience can wake from. That does, however, leave a lot of work for the audience to parse through and determine whether it really means anything and, more importantly, whether it resonates all that much. Goldman is too talented for me to concede to the latter, though the high-concept stalker hook will no doubt mislead audiences expecting something more traditional. Internally and externally, Sender experiments, new packages arrive like metaphoric shifts for what Sender wants to do and how it wants to do it.
The spell was cast on me, and I remained enraptured by Goldman’s sneaky dismantling of identity through commerce. We are what we buy, and everyone knows it. Our neighbors, our friends, and the mega-conglomerates who can have that order fulfilled in an hour or less. The real horror of Sender is what our lives look like when that’s all we’ve got left. We’re no longer people, just consumers, and our pasts are an invoice, not a collective of meaning. That’s terrifying, and in Goldman’s hands, those implications are liable to haunt you for days.
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Sender
Summary
Sender is a patient, disorienting watch about the horrors of consumerism and its insidious links to the self.
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