FUCKTOYS (Annapurna Sriram, 2025)
The world is cleaning itself up. Last year John Waters announced he was working on a new film, Liarmouth, and before the year was over, he was making a new announcement to say the film would not be made; no one wanted to give a single penny to fund it. If the Pope Of Trash can’t get his first film in twenty years made, is there any hope for lesser known perverts? Is there no room in cinemas for perverts, weirdos and trash lovers anymore? This is my biggest fear, but a light is guiding me out of the tunnel, the light of genius auteur Annapurna Sriram, and her masterpiece debut, Fucktoys.
Fucktoys follows sex worker, AP, after finding out she’s cursed. The only way to lift it? One thousand dollars and sacrificing a lamb. AP has neither the money or the lamb, and thus begins her adventure through Trashtown, USA. Over the course of two days and one long night, AP turns tricks in all sorts of ways to try and raise the money to break her curse, and we get to witness every glorious second of it.
Trashtown is meticulously designed, every element unique, building a kaleidoscopic world that we never wanted to leave. Cars with landline phones in them, victorian hair-dos, tarot readers floating in the middle of the bayou, beer cans labeled “DAD BEER” and “CHEAP BEER”, leather-daddy cops, and maybe most spectacularly, AP’s ‘house’, or rather, her pieces of boudoir-style furniture beautifully laid out in a picture perfect meadow, where she changes out of her floral two piece into the exact same floral two piece. From the opening shot to the credits, nothing on screen is unintentional, the world so real despite how fantastical everything is. It makes the perfect home for the crew of lovable, and some not-so-lovable, oddballs AP encounters along her journey, perhaps most importantly, her recently released from prison friend/love interest, Danni, played by Sadie Scott, who joins AP on this odyssey.
AP and Danni
Perpetually bloodied and injured, as if every time they aren’t on screen they may have been roughhousing with God-knows-who, Danni is with AP through thick and thin, from peeing on a client to stealing a baby goat for her. Another saviour for AP, is Robert, the middle-aged married man who AP is sleeping with. Played by Damian Young in an absolutely stellar performance, Robert is possibly the sweetest cheater ever put to screen, offering to pay for AP’s curse-lifting and lifting her from the middle of nowhere when all else has failed. He also delivers a perfect line with, “I just like old movies and musicals”. Us too, Robert. Through it all, he manages to come off as the most normal man in Trashtown, and possibly the kindest, but he is absolutely still a part of that world; at home, his children watch a perverted version of Mr Rogers and he’s sleeping with a sex worker behind his wife’s back. That seems to be the way of Trashtown, and we really wouldn’t want it any other way.
Brilliantly witty and tongue-in-cheek, which feels odd to say about a film that really bares it all, the script is laugh-out-loud funny. It’s irreverent, poking fun at celebrity culture, personality-psychics, capitalism, class, and American culture as it stands, though the jokes never come off as mean. Through all the extreme, outlandish moments, the dialogue remains down to Earth and relatable, which heightens the comedy of these scenes. Sure it’s funny to see an old man gagged with a ballgag being peed on, but Fucktoys goes further, having the pee-ers (AP and Danni) having a completely normal catch up about life above him.
The film was shot on 16mm film by the ever-talented Cory Fraiman-Lott, and the grainy texture adds a new layer of grime to the world. There’s no better word for the cinematography than beautiful. The camera movements as we follow AP on her moped feel reminiscent of how John Waters would’ve shot Divine on the streets of Baltimore. Most striking of all is the colouring, neon and pastel and candy-coloured all at once, this world wouldn’t feel right without it, even the strip club AP briefly works at is illuminated in stunning neon monochrome, pinks and purples and reds. Everything has a dazzling twinkle to it, curtains in the strip club, the shimmer of a swimming pool, and especially in AP’s eyes. The cinematography does everything to make the film and the world of Trashtown all the more magical.
The most important, and most perfect part of this film? Annapurna herself. Director, writer, producer, and star of the film, she is the complete beating heart, the driving life-force of everything we witness. There is no scene without her, she is our constant figure, moving through the immaculate world of Trashtown, almost always with an ever-calm, ever-excited, sweet smile on her face. The love she has for not just her own character, but for the ensemble of weirdos and for the world they inhabit is felt immediately and throughout, no matter how dark things can get. Despite how crazy her situation is, and how crazy the world around her is, AP feels so real, and so human, just trying to make the best of a bad situation, and really, isn’t that what we’re all trying to do? She serves as a reminder to always look on the bright side and to not take ourselves or the world around us so seriously.
