Would you rather be pissed off or pissed on? Visionary Filmmaker Annapurna Sriram intends to do both. Sickeningly subversive and chaotically campy, her new film Fucktoys is a lusciously sexual fever dream that pays stylistic tributes to the gritty experimental aesthetics and indulgent deviancy of John Waters, Gregg Araki, and 70’s grindhouse cinema. Sriram powerfully embodies the minxy main role of AP, a sex worker who must navigate the underbelly of Trashtown, USA with her best friend Danni (Sadie Scott) after learning from a psychic (Big Freedia) that she is cursed. Along with the neon strip clubs and policemen’s bondage uniforms, Trashtown is as seedy as the pair’s journey is debaucherous, and all of this illuminated through candylike vivid colors that gorgeously contrast the grainy 16mm film.
With an unapologetically unmissable name, Fucktoys made its raunchy debut at SXSW to a large audience ready to be immersed in Sriram’s playfully immoral and boundary-pushing creativity. What truly lies at the foundation of her film and what supports its dreamy depravity is her clear objective to provide female POC and AAPI representation that goes beyond typical Hollywood stereotypes. Tired of always playing the “Muslim girl with an arranged marriage” or the “ethnically ambiguous doctor,” Sriram wanted to challenge these limiting myopic portrayals and create a fully realized, dynamic lead character who is feminine, sexually liberated, unrestrained, and anything but pigeonholed. While AP is not defined by her race and perceived ascriptions, her presence and actions in the film platforms what women like her can do both on-screen, and in larger Hollywood.
Beyond its bold aesthetics and provocative themes, Fucktoys resonates as a commentary on a generation crushed by economic precarity. AP and her peers are not just sexual outlaws—they are casualties of a late-stage capitalistic system that commodifies and exploits youth, creativity, and desire. Queerness is a key and defiant aspect of her film, embracing the wide and unlabeled spectrum of identities, gender expressions, sexualities, and of course, kinks. What is typically considered taboo, uncouth, unladylike, and fringe is displayed in full transgressive force, supportively spotlighting BDSM as natural, empowering, and revolutionary within both the film and what is typically allowed on-screen.
While there is violence, spitting, urinating, and other unconventional actions not typically seen enacted, what drives the fun in all the purposefully salacious discomfort is Sriram’s precise script, mesmerizing cinematography, and comically absurd approach. The tone is lighthearted, rivetingly riotous, and intellectually self-aware to the references to prior related films it’s revitalizing. The acting and physical scenarios are intentionally campy and over-the-top, the wardrobe and settings are radiantly anachronistic, and it all comes together with the lush and vintage 16mm film. Other punk and unconventional movies akin to such an aesthetic experience are reminiscent in Penelope Spheeris’s Suburbia (1983), Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016), and Sean Price Williams’s The Sweet East (2023). Sriram cements Fucktoys as this era’s much-needed visual hedonistic transgression and immortalizing love letter to Waters and Araki, and all with a punk POC addition.At its core, Sriram uses Fucktoys to echo the reclamation of identity and sexuality for tokenized AAPI and POC both on-screen and in actuality. Sriram has truly carved out space not just for herself, but for the future of AAPI and POC actors in the most grotesque, uninhibited, and necessary contemporary film.
