Britt Lower & Rhea Seehorn’s Harrowing Thriller Makes Online Shopping A True Nightmare

A common misconception around the surveillance state assumes our devices are listening to us. It seems like if you so much as mention feeling, say, bloated, suddenly your Instagram algorithm is sending you targeted ads for mushroom coffee, which supposedly is effective at reducing stomach inflammation (I may be speaking from experience). The truth is actually much more sinister. Tech companies have more or less foregone the requisite process of asking for our permission to collect our data, and now high-level metric tracking allows agencies to triangulate where we are, what we might like to buy, what our friends and family like to buy, and most concerning, the very intricate behavior of our spending.

Sender, the feature debut from Russell Goldman, which is based on his 2022 short Return to Sender, preys upon this seemingly universally held fear of our capitalist overlords. The United States is especially trapped under the thumb of endless buying, if our overflowing, post-Christmas landfills are any indication, and Goldman effectively, and terrifyingly, dramatizes how we are being swallowed up under the false notion that material things can save us from ourselves.

Britt Lower Shines As Sender Gets More And More Nightmarish

Sender is not the easiest watch. An anxiety-driven nightmare, Goldman’s film doesn’t just examine surveillance habits and the cycle of supply and demand, but our relationship to these things and the comfortable embrace of addiction. This is where Julia Day (Severance‘s Britt Lower) lives, and to help us understand what it’s like to be inside her head, Goldman and editor Marco Rosas cut with dizzying alacrity, snapping space and time like a folded belt.

There’s a fascinating relationship between the edit and Gavin Brivik’s machinic, metallic score. It feels like Julia is being thrown about by forces well beyond her control. If you’re anything like Julia, that probably means you’ll end up chasing the bottle. When we meet her, she is both three weeks sober and three weeks unemployed; the former is a direct result of the latter, thanks to a forced bout of rehab. But it isn’t clear how seriously she’s taking it: At an Alcoholics Anonymous session, she sits off to the side, refusing to participate.

Instead, Julia endlessly scrolls an e-commerce app called Smirk, which very directly references the behemoth that is Amazon in both style and branding. Despite her reluctance to be there, however, Julia corners Whitney (Rhea Seehorn), a quick-to-anger fellow addict who ironically runs a whiskey distillery, to be her sponsor. Whitney refuses the charge, but Julia doesn’t seem to care, ceaselessly bothering her via text and voice memos.

She continues to bug Whitney, especially when her home starts to get flooded with packages for things she did not buy, yet are disturbingly tailored to her. At first, it’s just a lipstick that is exactly her preferred shade of red, but soon she is receiving things that are tied to intimate details from her troubled history: boxes of condoms; a drum set; protein powder that her former co-worker Dustin (Utkarsh Ambudkar) recommended. The folks at Smirk quality control tell her she’s not crazy: she never bought these items. But they also can’t say who is sending them.

Meanwhile, Julia’s sister, Tatiana (Anna Baryshnikov), a realtor with a savior complex and a sudden admiration for Jesus Christ, nags at her and decides to move in. The only person who seems to genuinely care about her is the Smirk delivery person, with whom she potentially could have an innocent and awkward tryst. Charlie (David Dastalmachian) doesn’t offer a ton of help, however, beyond a friendly face and a charming admiration for Julia’s multimedia artwork.

As Julia continues to become obsessed with unboxing this mystery (hard not to, considering the sea of cardboard threatening to drown her), she loses her grip in scenes of mounting disorientation. Compounded by a lack of sleep and a replacement addiction to a pill that is, ironically, supposed to curtail her cravings, Julia’s escalating madness more closely resembles the character falls in films like Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane or Darren Aronofsky’s Pi.

Sender is designed with extraordinary precision… Lower’s work here is especially phenomenal.

Things go from dizzying to nightmarish for Julia (and for us) when she decides to take a job in customer service for Smirk, presumably to learn about what is happening from the inside. Of course, the answers to her questions aren’t half as important as the implication of the pursuit. Sender audaciously suggests that losing yourself to materialism is as harrowing a journey as losing yourself to self-harm, especially since an overreliance on goods can only result in a loss of personhood. The most terrifying, looming question of Sender is the notion that, even if Julia is able to find out who is antagonizing her, she might not like who’s left in the silence.

Sender is designed with extraordinary precision. There’s an overwhelming fervor to Nathan Ruyle’s sound design, which emphasizes the violence incurred from too much time spent online: Julia’s stabbing of unopened boxes, the clashing of drum cymbals, static sounds. The noxious, radioactive greens that encompass the screen of Gemma Doll-Grossman’s camera ensures that Sender consistently nauseates.

Lower’s work here is especially phenomenal. As Julia, who chugs Celsius energy drinks like milk for a babe, she jitters and slashes her way through psychosis. Dastalmachian’s soft-spoken romance is a perfect foil. All of them, cast and crew together, make certain that Sender is a package you’ll want to open.

Sender screened at the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival.