The prolific young filmmaker blends melodrama, queer coming-of-age storytelling, and lo-fi sci-fi into one of Fantasia’s most charming discoveries.
One of the great joys of film festivals is stumbling across something you weren’t planning to see and discovering a film you can’t stop thinking about. That was exactly the case Monday afternoon when, looking to fill a gap in my schedule, I wandered into Our Effed Up World the latest feature from prolific Australian trans filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay (T Blockers, The Serpent’s Skin). Remarkably, it’s already her seventh film at just 21 years old.
Part hangout movie, part coming-of-age drama, and part lo-fi sci-fi creature feature, Our Effed Up World plays like the long-lost pilot to a cult TV series you’d happily binge over a weekend. The film follows Sheri (Sara Thompson), a young woman reeling from the death of her grandmother while trying to extricate herself from a toxic relationship. As if navigating grief and heartbreak weren’t enough, aliens decide to invade her sleepy hometown and make their headquarters inside her favorite hangout—the local video store.
Mackay wastes no time introducing her lovable trio of unlikely alien hunters: Sheri, the film’s fearless heroine; her fiercely loyal best friend Poppy (Annapurna Sriram); and their local analog-media dealer Finn (Jess McLeod). The first half leans heavily into melodrama, grounding the story in Sheri’s grief and emotional upheaval as she finally cuts ties with her selfish, impossibly handsome boyfriend. It’s emotional groundwork that pays off beautifully in the back half, where Mackay pivots into full-blown sci-fi horror.
In true Doctor Who fashion, the extraterrestrial menace has taken one of Sheri’s friends hostage in the basement of the video story, using her paralyzed body as a grotesque incubator to spawn more aliens. It’s a wonderfully odd escalation that feels perfectly at home within the film’s syndication playground. Like the best episodes of Doctor Who, World reminds us that the strangest adventures are ultimately about the people who choose to face them together.
As a Dr. Who fan with a love for melodrama, Effed Up world hit the spot. The cast here perfectly nails the vibe, the premise is just believable enough and the friendships at the core of the film supply the driving force and unflappable heart. It’s nostalgia, but rather than simply cinematic pastiche, Alice takes these things making them her own and giving us something that is much more personal while leveraging current sensibilities. Rather than merely echoing the pop culture that shaped her, Alice Maio Mackay bends it into something unmistakably her own, heartfelt, idiosyncratic, and impossible to dismiss and I can’t wait to see what she does next.
