Movies
First Look at Jamie Lee Curtis in Paranoid Thriller ‘Sender’
A red-headed Jamie Lee Curtis is deep in thought in the first image of the horror icon in Sender, courtesy of THR.
The paranoid thriller will have its world premiere at SXSW in Texas this weekend.
Russell Goldman makes his directorial debut on the project based on his 2022 short Return to Sender, which he adapted into a 2023 Black List script.
Britt Lower (“Severance”) stars as Julia, who was fired three weeks ago. She also got sober three weeks ago. She’s starting over in a suburban rental, and doing a lot of online shopping to help make the space her own, fast.
When packages she didn’t order start showing up at her door — a blender, a corkscrew, her signature shade of lipstick — they feel so unnervingly tied to her past that it starts to feel like someone is watching her.
The shopping site Smirk denies responsibility. Increasingly paranoid, Julia tumbles down a rabbit hole to find the identity of her anonymous sender.
Rhea Seehorn (“Pluribus”), Anna Baryshnikov (Love Lies Bleeding), David Dastmalchian (Late Night with the Devil), Utkarsh Ambudkar (“Ghosts”), Mike Mitchell (“Twisted Metal”), Edward Torres (Return to Sender), Alyssa Limperis (“What We Do in the Shadow”), and Inger Stratton round out the cast.
Curtis produces alongside Molly Hallam and Jake Katofsky. Executive producers include Goldman, Lower, Akshay Shah, Thomas Grabinski, Paris Jones, and Andre Ray.
“[Curtis] built the infrastructure for me and Britt and the whole Sender team to find what moved us,” Goldman tells THR. “She would be candid about how it landed with her, pushing for better.”
Before updating the video nasty Faces of Death, director Daniel Goldhaber and writer Isa Mazzei explored the dangers of online life in tech-thriller Cam, their feature debut that was acquired by Netflix in 2018 after making waves on the festival circuit.
At the end of last year, the Netflix exclusive quietly departed from the streaming platform, left without another streaming home.
It’s not an isolated story; Mike Flanagan’s Hush also left streaming entirely for a period until it was finally picked up on both physical media and other streaming services.
While the tech-thriller currently isn’t available to watch on Netflix, Tubi, Hulu, or any other platforms, that’s not a problem for Cam thanks to a very cool move by Goldhaber: the director has made his breakout film accessible to watch online for free via his website.
As his site notes: “CAM is unfortunately not currently available to view on any platforms, so you can watch it here if you like :).“
No subscriptions or fees necessary, just hit play.
Cam follows Alice (Madeline Brewer), who works as an online cam girl obsessed with her ranking on the cam site. The higher her ranking goes, the more it draws unwanted attention, and Alice soon finds herself replaced on her own show with a doppelganger.
Written by Mazzei, a former camgirl, it uses the horror thriller premise to examine the life of a sex worker; Alice’s career ambition is directly at odds with the shame it brings to her family, and how she tries to spare them from it by keeping them in the dark. It only compounds her danger when the doppelganger enters the equation in Goldhaber’s engaging thriller.
For a deep dive into the treacherous world of Cam, listen to Horror Queers’ episode on it now.
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