Debut Director Crafts Audacious Sex Work Journey

After her tooth falls out, AP, the young woman at the center of Annapurna Sriram’s delightfully audacious feature debut F*cktoys, visits a tarot reader for answers. The cards — an upright Sun, a Five of Cups and the Hanged Man — are not in her favor. The bad news, according to her seer (Big Freedia), is that someone has cursed AP (played by Sriram). The good news? The doomed sex worker can change her luck with one thousand dollars and a sacrificial lamb. 

F*cktoys, which won a special jury prize in the narrative feature competition after its SXSW premiere, follows AP as she embarks on a chaotic journey to spiritual freedom. Her adventures through Trashtown, U.S.A, the fictional locale where the film is set, are marked by unexpected reunions, surprise encounters and occasional flirtations with real danger. Sriram takes bold swings in F*cktoys, which adopts John Waters’ transgressive ethos and love of filth and retrofits it for mystics and the astrology age. Like Pink Flamingos, F*cktoys revels in purposeful sin. Sriram’s bacchanalia underscores the contradictions of prevailing conservative social mores, celebrity culture and modern day sex work. 

News of the curse unsettles AP, but she doesn’t act immediately. Her first stop is a raucous house party, where she gives a client a golden shower and reunites with her old friend Danni (Sadie Scott). While AP seeks a second opinion — as one must with all diagnoses, spiritual and medical — Danni, curious about her friend’s work, agrees to take on a client. Their appointment with James Francone, a high-profile and self-involved artist played by The Parenting’s Brandon Flynn, is one of the funnier gags in F*cktoys. Sriram, who also wrote the screenplay, sends up the power dynamics between celebrities and anyone who works for them.

If Anora offered a sex work tale as Cinderella story than F*cktoys fashions a narrative more akin to Alice in Wonderland. Sriram’s film unfolds with an associative, non-linear logic, and each encounter could be its own discrete vignette. Working with DP Cory Fraiman-Lott and production designer Nichole McMinn, Sriram imbues each trashy vignette with its own striking visual language.

From the second psychic, AP visits Robert (Damian Young), a repeat client who projects his internal shame onto her. He, a married man with children, uses their post-coital serenity to impart advice. He reminds her that she has no job security or health insurance, and he’d like to help her. Prompted by this unexpected gesture, AP tells Robert about the curse and asks for some money. Of course, when confronted with the reality of helping her, he becomes apprehensive and on edge. 

So the search continues and AP decides to work a party — a debaucherous evening with the very wealthy — to get more money. This vignette, marked by shimmering red decor and a grotesque clientele, feels the most inspired by Waters and his early work with Divine. Exaggerated close-ups and unsteady, almost drunken tilts underscore the ridiculousness of the rich partygoers complaining about how oppressive the current politics are and how difficult it is to be them. 

For all its fun, F*cktoys isn’t exclusively interested in filth and farce; AP’s search for spiritual salvation is also dotted with more earnest moments about desire and companionship. In their gloomy forecasting, some of the psychics mention a twin flame, someone whom AP connected with in a past life. The sex worker thinks that person is Danni, and that assumption changes the texture of their time together. One of the most enduring images in F*cktoys is when AP and Danni ride through town on their motorbike, their increasingly disheveled appearances marking the passage of time and the difficulty of their journey. These moments of camaraderie and longing give F*cktoys real, unexpected heart.