Our Effed Up World review: X-Files-style spooky stoner movie fun

Outsiders finding their people, and their movies, at a VHS store is the wholesome validation of community we need right now. The idea of safety in the analogue, a salve in our terminally online times, was the bedrock of Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, led by Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder. It also anchors the Scooby Gang-adjacent crew of Alice Maio Mackay’s Our Effed Up World.

Australian wunderkind Mackay shadowed Schoenbrun on Camp Miasma – here’s hoping she’ll also get a big budget boost soon. Mackay’s slippily timed and placed genre features also explore identity and belonging within genre frameworks she’s similarly upending, including last year’s superb The Serpent’s Skin.

Our Effed Up World offers another cosy-cool entry in this nostalgia-charged but forward-looking sanctuary.

Our Effed Up World: Adelaide

Co-produced by Schoenbrun and shot in Australia’s scariest cinematic town, Adelaide, home of Talk to Me and The Babadook, Our Effed Up World stars One of Us is Lying actor Sara Thompson.

She plays Sherri, a supermarket worker who fears meteorites. We first meet her curled up in a garden chair next to her beloved gran, Grace, an old-school beatnik and former war correspondent played with a cinematic hug by excellent Lantana actor Kerry Armstrong and her dad, Hank.

He’s played by The Serpent’s Skin star Scott Major, with his co-star in that film, Jordan Dulieu, also reappearing this time as Sherri’s selfish, deadbeat boyfriend, Harry.

Mackay shares Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s fondness for a recurring ensemble as well as his boundary-pushing prolificness, with the familiarity of returning actors shedding their previously worn skin to slip into very different roles in Mackay’s spooky universe.

Hank assures Sherri she doesn’t need to worry about the nickel and magnesium-smuggling celestial bodies swooping across the starry sky above their home that she says are green ‘like a cheesy horror movie’. He insists they’ll burn up in the atmosphere.

‘Tell that to the dinosaurs,’ Sherri scoffs. ‘Plot twist, they all have a zombie virus in them.’

If you’re wondering if the divergence on meteor preference signals a schism between dad and daughter, they’re actually pretty close. Sherri’s mum died while she was young, so Harry raised her with help from Grace. Tragically, the older woman is also terminally ill, opening old wounds.

Our Effed Up World: great cast

As Harry retreats to his research – in tandem with a Russian counterpart on the other end of the phone as one of those meteors does, indeed, puncture Earth’s fiery shield, crash-landing nearby, bearing a cold and calculating alien lifeforce that can mimic its victims’ voice to the hood.

Oblivious, Sherri hangs with her retro-cool VHS-loving buddies, including supermarket co-worker Poppy (Fucktoys star Annapurna Sriram), VHS rental store owner Finn (Camp Miasma’s Jess McLeod) and her book-keeper Ash (Strife actor Karis Oka).

Mackay once again makes the most of an international cast to blur our grasp on where or when Our Effed Up World plays out. The inspired casting of local comedian, film critic and all-round lovely fellow and internet sensation Alexei Toliopoulos is a hoot.

He plays against type as an exceedingly boorish and suitably ill-fated film bro who harangues the gang.

Adelaide-based actor Connor Pullinger also plays a nuisance of a dude in a film littered with them. The goon-swilling Harry is also useless, with a fed-up Sherri dumping him in a comically cruel spray that includes the savage takedown that, ‘It’s like you sweat sweet Lambrusco, and it’s gross,’ plus the additional burn that his idea of a decent root feels like, ‘You’re just jerking off into me like I’m a living Fleshlight’.

Our Effed Up World: zesty times

A zesty, 70-minute adventure with a dash of The X-Files to its mystery-of-the-week feel, Our Effed Up World leans into its familiar feel through a queer lens that is very of the moment.

Pretty soon, that alien is causing mayhem, with a body count climbing steadily as the gang try to figure out the nature of the creature, wonderfully realised with a deliberately janky, classic Doctor Who vibe.

Thompson is a mighty final girl who shares awesome energy with Sriram’s spunky Poppy, fond of spouting wisdom slacker-style. McLeod and Oka are also a great double-act, with Our Effed Up World burning bright, with a goofy stoner vibe bubbling alongside its more melancholic feels.

Throw in a noir-inflected animated film-within-the-film, a hint of Cold War politics that’s a pillar of the sci-fi end of horror and an 80s-style synth-driven score by Freya Berkhout, plus a bonus a cameo from Lesbian Space Princess co-director Leela Varghese, and you’re in for a real good time

It’s all underpinned with a starry-eyed wonder and a family core that’s both biological and chosen, anchored by Thomson’s shining-bright presence and the charm of Armstrong. When dad says that ‘there are still plenty of mysteries out there,’ Grace smiles, knowingly.

‘You’ll solve them all one day, I’m certain of it,’ she says.

Mackay, one of our most exciting filmmakers, has it all figured out.

Our Effed up World is screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival.

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