Sender opens Chattanooga Film Festival, 18 June 2026
Writer/director Russell Goldman’s Sender, expanded from his short film Return to Sender (2022), begins with what seems like an ordinary scene, as middle-aged Lisa Barr is shown chopping celery in the kitchen of the home where she lives alone – although the fact that Lisa is played by Jamie Lee Curtis, indelibly associated with the Halloween franchise, already hints at some kind of suburban horror to come. It arrives not in the form of a masked prowler – although there will certainly be one of those later in the film – but a box delivered to her door, which surreally contains a clod of grass on soil, and an old, very used knee pad inscribed with the handwritten words “CANT CANT CAN”. These items may appear valueless, but for Lisa, who we have already noticed limps in a leg brace from a knee injury, they trigger a profound personal response. For this one-time athlete and P.E. teacher inhales the grass deeply, smiles warmly but sadly at the pad which she holds against her knee – and then she holds the package’s bubble wrap over her face in an attempt to suffocate herself. Someone has – very effectively – targeted Lisa with her own broken memories and disappointments.
Julia Day (Britt Lower) also has a damaged past from which she is trying to extricate herself. Three weeks ago she lost her travel agency job owing to alcoholic excess, and stopped drinking then and there. “Nobody throws a party like Julia,” as her former colleague Dustin (Utkarsh Ambudkar), now himself in recovery, tells her at her first AA meeting. These are Julia’s early steps towards change. She has moved into a new, empty rental on a suburban cul de sac which she is slowly filling with her own furnishings, and she is tentatively pursuing an interest in art and music which she vaguely hopes to parlay into a degree at grad school. Yet she is a scatty, unfocused mess – and is soon transforming the house into a reflection of her anarchic inner state. She attends the AA meeting, but sits it out. She briefly meets distillery manager Whitney (Rhea Seeborn) there and then calls her day and night, despite Whitney’s insistence that she does not wish to be Julia’s sponsor. She has insomnia. She lies compulsively and defensively. And then the packages start arriving.
Julia gets a lot of deliveries from Smirk, whose workings, iconography and arch name represent an ironic nod and wink to Amazon. After all, she is trying to rebuild her life. She is even on a first-name basis with Smirk delivery van guy Charlie (David Dastmalchian), who drops things at her doorstep every day. Yet soon packages appear that she did not order – first just products that resemble things she already owns, and then items (a cocktail blender, a bottle opener) that seem like highly personal attacks on her ongoing recovery. As Julia becomes ever more paranoid and begins to suspect that this is less a basic delivery scam than malicious stalking and targeted conspiracy, she starts to investigate, recruiting the help of Charlie (despite not trusting him or anyone else), and even getting a job with Smirk – and though she remains as mercurial as ever, this obsessive research brings her a new, necessary distraction from drinking.
“You’re not the only person who lives on this street,” Tatiana (Anna Baryshnikov) tells Julia after moving in to keep an eye on her sister, “You’re not the centre of the universe.” Sender is a film that for the most part confines us to Julia’s reeling, fragile headspace, with every moment of her life playing out like a manic episode of traumatic flashbacks and wild lurches forward, as editor Marco Rosas’ desultory, disorienting jump cuts vividly convey the protagonist’s frenzied, free-associative mindset and addled tunnel vision. Yet it begins not with Julia but with Lisa, and it gradually reveals a whole ensemble of characters who are all struggling and suffering as much as Julia, even if their troubles often go ignored by Julia in her own distraught state.
For here mental illness is commoditised and privatised, even as humanity is reduced to our keepsakes and purchases, and attempts to reach out and touch someone, whether with benign or malign intent, are conducted remotely through the material objects that make up our lives. Fortunately Julia, for all her faults, is crazily eccentric enough not to be reducible to her possessions, and is doggedly determined not to leave a mystery unsolved, and especially one that is so intimate and intrusive – even if her impulsive volatility, which has already caused so much damage, seems likely to leave yet more delirium in its wake. And so Sender, which starts off something like David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) or Michael Haneke’s Hidden (Caché, 2005), ends up delivering a narrative of recovery – and not just Julia’s – as our heroine emerges from her narcissistic nightmare able to see others again. As a freaky, often very funny study in character, consumerism and chaos, it delivers.
strap: It delivers: in Russell Goldman’s debut feature, a reeling, recovering alcoholic receives packages from a mysterious source
© Anton Bitel
