Annapurna Sriram’s ‘F*cktoys’ harkens back to a dormant era of trash cinema

Best known for her role on Billions, Sriram received a Special Jury Award “for a Multi-Hyphenate” at SXSW, where the movie was programmed with its uncensored title. In addition to writing and directing, she plays protagonist AP, a sex worker living in a fictitious, pre-digital American city known as Trashtown. Its industrial smoke stacks, strangely dressed garbage clean-up crews, and enormous, fancy hotels (one of which is simply called Fancy Hotel) speak of a post-housing-recession economic sensibility and wealth disparity, even though the movie cobbles together a number of 20th Century influences, from dial-up Internet and brick phones, to AP’s nebulously 1960s hair and makeup. She could be a classy heroine of the era hailing from practically any country—given the movie’s cross-cultural soundtrack feature tunes in multiple languages from Italian to Vietnamese, she may as well be—but that she is, in her own words, “a hoe” by profession is just the tip of F*cktoys’ subversive iceberg.

The hazy, dreamlike story begins out on a raft in the middle of a swamp, with the tongue-in-cheek fantasia of AP being read tarot cards by a fortune teller (played by rapper/drag queen Big Freedia), who clocks an apparently urgent curse afflicting AP, which can be lifted for the mere sum of $1,000. In a fun running gag, AP crosses paths with numerous mystics and psychics who practically smell the curse on her. Real or not, she believes there’s something to it, and that people can sense her string of bad luck, from her recent breakup to her mysterious lost tooth.

The question of how she’ll lift this curse (if at all) looms large over the plot, but F*cktoys is largely a story of kindness and community, with frank depictions of kink and violence along robustly defined lines of consent. As soon as anyone crosses that boundary, the movie dips its toe into somber, unnerving territory. But for the most part, F*cktoys is casually euphoric—which is to say, joyfully unafraid—in its matter-of-fact portrayal of the nasty, queer fight club in the backyard of a grungy, dilapidated house where AP spits and urinates on an eager, tied-up john. When she reunites with her crush, the charismatic, androgynous Danni (Sadie Scott), she quickly invites them to join in the golden shower as they catch up.

That the leather-clad Danni spends much of the film proud of their busted, bleeding lip is immediately alluring, but it’s also an image Sriram doesn’t take for granted. AP helps Danni out by finding them high-paying clients, but as soon as the lines of consent and respect are blurred, Danni and AP are rightfully put out. (Danni in particular rebels with righteous violence, punching out a pompous James Franco-type).

Over its 106 minutes, the hijinks-heavy comedy follows AP and Danni from gig to gig, which Sriram captures with the raw, improvisational, cobbled-together quality of a low-budget grindhouse nudie. There isn’t actually all that much nudity to be found in F*cktoys, but what little it features feels intimate and playful in an almost platonic sense. Which isn’t to say it isn’t sexy—Sriram absolutely intends for it to be, and she knows how to wield her own image as the object of her camera’s gaze—but like early Waters, the quality Sriram brings as a filmmaker is one of camaraderie between the characters, and between the actors and the lens.

It's sexy the way camp is sexy. There’s a self-awareness to F*cktoys, but it never apologizes for what it is, even though it’s so heavy on the homage that it becomes impossible to discuss it as anything but a reflection on the increasingly conservative constraints of American filmmaking, in the form of postmodern pastiche. That’s hardly a knock against it, mind you. The movie is nothing if not free (and freeing) as self-expression, and should it receive some form of distribution, it’s likely to introduce a whole new generation of cinemagoer to a type of “lowbrow” art that has largely fallen by the wayside.

Despite its seemingly facile flourishes, F*cktoys is incredibly smart about the way it frames labor and exploitation. Sriram casts Black actors in prominent roles, and subsequently has AP navigate the world around her with an alternating awkwardness and openness, depending on her proximity to each supporting player. They inform her worldview just as much as her presence impacts their day, and Sriram’s camera never shies away from the larger racial and gender hierarchies that frame all her sex worker characters. The delights of F*cktoys lie in its liberating sense of self, which Sriram equally embodies in her performance as AP. The character seems self-assured, but there’s always uncertainty lurking around the corner, given her profession.

At a time when sex-positive cinema pronounces itself, (even in outstanding kink films like Babygirl or acclaimed sex worker dramas like Anora), and takes pride in those pronouncements, F*cktoys engages in a mode of movie watching—and moviemaking—whose most subversive element is, ironically, nostalgic for something old. It doesn’t break new ground, but it shatters the current mold of generally acceptable images and prescriptive stories by returning to an era where operating from the fringes of society offered its own kind of giddy excitement, wherein the sexual norms of the mainstream may as well have never existed at all. The film is undoubtedly fun, but what makes it triumphant is that Sriram knows exactly what kind of cinema she wants to make, and in a tragic moment when even Waters himself can’t get funding, she practically moves heaven and earth to re-write her own place in the current media landscape.