I watched Sender as part of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, where it had its New York City premiere on October 19, 2026. Director Russell Goldman was present for a Q&A after the film.
Sender is a film that’s all about the actors, although that doesn’t seem entirely fair to all those who worked on the cinematography, the costumes, the sounds and, of course the writing and directing. All those are indeed excellent, but Sender showcases a tour de force performance by Britt Lower as the lead character.
From the moment we first see her, Britt Lower’s Julia seems to be on a knife-edge – hunched over, too thin, intense, wired, restless. She’s moving into a new apartment, has just lost her job, and is sort of looking for what’s next – a job, an MFA? She’s also in recovery, and her alcoholism was clearly the reason she lost said job (although it doesn’t seem like it was much of a loss). Indeed, the seeming deadness of Julia’s job may go some way to explain her excessive drinking. She always, as one co-worker put it, threw the best parties. What else was there to do?
As if struggling to stay sober weren’t difficult enough, Julia starts getting packages delivered to her new apartment that she didn’t order. Granted, she’s ordering a lot – fixing up her rental – but then strange and random deliveries also start arriving: cymbals for instance. But some of these unexpected packages have meaning for Julia: the protein powder a former colleague is selling (a colleague she thinks she had sex with but who says she didn’t); a blender like the one she used to make drinks with at parties. And some of the objects seem uncanny, even sinister – a leather mask, for instance. Boxes pile up – all from a company, Smirk, that clearly evokes Amazon. Whatever else Sender is doing, it’s making some comment about how consumers are drowning in stuff they don’t want or need.
Julia’s packages
The highlight of the deliveries is the person who drops them off – Charlie (the wonderful David Dastmalchian – of Late Night with the Devil among other things). Charlie is a rock – a calm force – as Julia’s life spins out of control. Director Russell Goldman said that what Julia is doing is “surfing” in his Q&A after the film. It could be surfing; it could be spinning out of control – but whatever you call it, Julia becomes totally obsessed with finding out who is sending her the packages, so many of which propel her back into unwanted memories, stopping her from moving on, moving forward.
The only thing I would really fault in Sender is the way it ends – and, by that, I mean prior to the credit sequence. (The credit sequence is pretty great.) Sender wraps up its mystery, but in a way that seems forced and that involves a lot of exposition by a character who has been given nothing in the course of the film to make us think they’d do what they apparently did. And even when we’re told why they did it, it’s just not convincing.
I can’t leave this review without mentioning the magnificent presence of Jamie Lee Curtis and Rhea Seehorn, both of whom put in excellent performances as women whom Julia – casting around for someone to be – thinks she might become.
In the end, this is Britt Lower’s film – and she is just amazing. She brilliantly embodies (and this is a very physical performance) the desperation of trying to grasp at meaning in a desert – a barren landscape of strip malls, deadening meaningless jobs, alcohol, superficial acquaintances, brown cardboard boxes and the automated (even when they’re technically human) voices on the other end of the line when something goes wrong with your package. A lot of films these days seem to be about the existential struggle to find meaning. This is one you should watch.
Films are always also about other films, and, in the Q&A, Russell Goldman mentioned two films in particular as being influences on Sender: Sydney Pollack’s surreal 1968 film The Swimmer (in my view one of Burt Lancaster’s best performances) and Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996). Like Sender, both of these films are about the struggle to find meaning in places that seem antithetical to it. They form an intriguing trilogy.
Sender has been picked up by Dark Sky Films and will see a spring 2027 release.
