FANTASIA26 REVIEW: Our Effed Up World [20XX]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 68 minutes
Director(s): Alice Maio Mackay
Writer(s): Benjamin Pahl Robinson & Alice Maio Mackay

Keep that fire alive.

Death isn’t a stranger to Sheri (Sara Thompson). She and her father (Scott Major’s Hank) moved after her mother died to put down roots with her grandmother (Kerry Armstrong’s Grace) at a place where he could better focus on meteor patterns for a secretive job funded by the Australian government. It’s not long before Grace passes too, leaving Sheri in a combatively nihilistic funk. She loses her filter for kindness, punches strangers, and prays for the apocalypse.

When she isn’t hanging with BFF Poppy (Annapurna Sriram) and watching bootleg VHS tapes rented from their friend Finn (Jess McLeod), of course. So, some things do still put a smile on Sheri’s face long enough to take her mind off so much loss. It’s just not Harry’s (Jordan Dulieu) wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am sexual prowess or her father’s usual avoidant tendency to bury himself in work. Maybe an alien invasion is exactly what she needs to pull herself out.

The latest feature from prolific filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay and her regular writing partner Benjamin Pahl Robinson, Our Effed Up World is definitely their leanest of the three I’ve seen. After Serpent’s Skin pushed the potential for complex storytelling in her oeuvre forward, this quick and dirty script skews closer to Carnage for Christmas insofar as pacing and a lack of excess. Introspection isn’t the goal. It’s about reaching the next beat.

So, that first glimpse of an alien creature is all we need to confirm its existence. There’s no “maybe it’s a mass delusion” or “maybe there will be an explanation later.” It’s an alien. It’s killed the character we just met for the sole purpose of providing someone to kill. And the connection between that victim and Sheri has irrevocably changed its identity to all but ensure it won’t kill her too. Convenient? Sure. But it’s also exactly what’s needed to keep rolling.

Then and only then do we finally get some context via flashbacks of Hank’s college days to show us that there’s precedent for an extraterrestrial predator and reason to not alert the authorities and Grace’s illness to let us into Sheri’s emotional state and better understand her death wish. These two things are crucial as far as letting us invest in father and daughter beyond the fact that the movie tells us to by revolving around them. There’s a reason to care.

Because Poppy’s “tough love” cues are fun but hollow when their conversations always progress plot above telling us who they are. Finn’s obvious crush on Poppy is one of the few aspects that feels purely character-driven and endearing as a result. They are the best part of the whole thanks to McLeod supplying a welcome dose of pragmatic sensibility opposite Sheri’s impulse to run into danger. Finn epitomizes Grace’s hope that Sheri stops fighting alone.

And Hank finally stepping up to protect Sheri when she needs it most. Not because he hasn’t before, but because she selfishly blames him for her grandmother’s death despite knowing it was out of his control. It’s a case where an implicit truth sometimes needs an explicit example to remind us that we can rely upon it. That we don’t have to go it alone. That z-grade movie-loving pot smokers in a nowhere town can save the world.

So, while the plot does wear its microbudget on its sleeve more than the actual production value (Our Effed Up World looks good—including the creepy tentacle egg and side-mouth humanoid creature), Mackay and Robinson still find ways to empower their characters with enough spunk and pathos to protect each other. I personally would have loved to see the friendships fleshed out more (the runtime is only sixty-eight minutes), but we get the necessary broad strokes.

The theme is less about living in the moment and more about knowing when a problem can be solved. You can’t cure cancer, but maybe you can use a loophole inherent to mankind’s flawed construction to turn a predator into prey. You can’t fix a friend’s depression, but maybe you can lend an ear and make them laugh enough times to help ease it. Because even if you don’t think preserving your own life is worth the trouble, preserving theirs still is.