The 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival, which concludes on Saturday, featured a time-traveling RV, a disemboweling unicorn, a transracial surgery and credible testimony that extra-terrestrials exist. Here’s what rose to the top, and what failed to take flight.
Homicidal Unicorns and a Singing Matthew McConaughey Stole the Show
SXSW has distinguished itself among the top film festivals with its Headliners section, a lineup of star-driven, studio-backed, crowd-pleasing premieres that thrill SXSW audiences and help launch the films into their wide releases — from “Bridesmaids,” “21 Jump Street,” and “A Quiet Place” to “Us,” “John Wick 4” and “The Idea of You.”
This year, only one Headliner fully fit the bill: The gory horror comedy “Death of a Unicorn,” starring Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega, had the audience laughing, screaming and cheering along with its story of a pair of homicidal fantasy creatures dispatching a über-wealthy family in the Canadian wilderness.
“Drop,” Blumhouse’s upcoming Christopher Landon-directed thriller, came awfully close, too, with lead Meghann Fahy absolutely captivating the crowd. Best known for one of the stand outs of “The White Lotus” Season 2, “Drop” cemented Fahy’s place as a movie star, appearing in every single scene of the movie as the widowed single mother who starts getting death threats and horrifying “drops” to her phone while on a first date (with the ever-so-charming Brandon Sklenar).
“The Rivals of Amziah King”; “Drop”
Junius Tully; Bernard Walsh/Universal Pictures
Meanwhile, “The Studio,” Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s satiric TV series about Hollywood, captivated fans with a two-episode premiere on opening night featuring cameos from Greta Lee, Sarah Polley, Paul Dano, Steve Buscemi, Charlize Theron and Martin Scorsese, all playing versions of themselves.
But the star who saw the warmest reception at this year’s festival was easily Matthew McConaughey, whose return to movie screens after a six-year hiatus in “The Rivals of Amziah King” earned the Austin local a hero’s welcome before the film, screening in the Narrative Spotlight section, had started playing. The movie’s joyously idiosyncratic story of a beekeeper and his foster daughter (newcomer Angelina LookingGlass) won over the audience so utterly — thanks in part to several exuberant musical performances, often led by McConaughey — that they leapt to their feet for a sustained standing ovation when writer-director Andrew Patterson stepped to the stage.
Most Headliners, However, Didn’t Live Up to the Name
The opening night film, Amazon MGM Studios’ “Another Simple Favor,” boasts murders and plot twists galore, but narratively, it couldn’t compete with its prequel, 2018’s “A Simple Favor.” That said, the screening got a boost from the bright spotlight on one of its stars, Blake Lively, as she navigated her first major public appearance since launching her ongoing legal battle with Justin Baldoni — the crowd was plenty happy to see her.
Amazon was also behind two more of the Headliners. After “Another Simple Favor” was “The Accountant 2,” the follow-up to Ben Affleck’s 2018 action film about an autistic genius-slash-assassin, was average all around. Save for a line-dancing sequence that played well given the Texan setting of the premiere, the Variety reporters in the room felt there was nothing particularly memorable about the film itself or the crowd’s reaction to it, though Variety critic Owen Gleiberman did call it “an agreeably loopy hyperviolent good time.” “Holland,” led by Nicole Kidman, Matthew Macfadyen and Gael García Bernal, fell both narratively and with the audience. There were whispers of frustration throughout the theater with each of the film’s predictable twists, and many attendees opted not to stick around to hear the cast and crew explain them afterwards.
And then there was “Ash.” Hip-hop producer Flying Lotus’ sci-fi horror film debuted on in the festival’s final Headliner on Tuesday, at which point many festival attendees had already flown home, and the late placement was clearly for a reason. Though its visuals and soundscape were interesting enough, the outer space-set narrative led by Eiza González and Aaron Paul was as tropey and repetitive as they come, with a lack of cohesion and payoff that called into question whether it should have played SXSW at all.
Coming of Age Stories Remained SXSW’s Bread and Butter
The tried-and-true festival staple of the coming-of-age story — creative twists aplenty —provided some of SXSW’s biggest breakouts. Unabashed satire “Slanted” won the narrative feature competition with a story about a Chinese American teen (Shirley Chen) who undergoes a surgery to become white (Mckenna Grace) and up her chances at winning prom queen — think “The Substance” but about racial identity instead of aging. It’s a premise with so much potential to go wrong, but in debut writer-director Amy Wang’s hands, comes out not only campy and funny but truly smart. (Variety chief awards editor Clayton Davis served on the narrative feature jury.)
In a similarly satiric vein, “She’s the He” riffs off of right-wing fearmongering to tell a winning coming out story about a high school senior who only realizes she’s a trans woman after she pretends to be trans in order to sneak into the women’s locker room. The film, featuring a cast that almost entirely consists of LGBTQ actors, was written, shot and edited entirely in 2024, and could not feel more timely.
Alexander Ullom’s “It Ends” follows four friends from high school who reunite after four years for a late night hangout. The horrific, never-ending road they find themselves trapped on brings up big feelings and fights about their relationships, their values and their mental health in a genre-bender with impressively clear vision, especially given the cast and crew of first-time filmmakers in their 20s behind it.
Clockwise from top left: “She’s the He”; “Slanted”; “It Ends”
Bethany Michalski; Nathan Owens; Jazleana Jones
And what’s a coming-of-age roundup without some emotionally stunted characters in their late 20s and early 30s who still have growing up to do? Annapurna Sriram won a special jury award in the narrative feature competition for directing, producing and starring in “Fucktoys,” a way-out-there tale of a sex worker on a mission to reverse a curse. She’ll do whatever it takes, including sacrificing a baby goat. “The Threesome” makes its titular sex act seem chill, casual, even sweet — until one of the three (Ruby Cruz) makes a chaotic reappearance in the lives of the other two (Zoey Deutch and Jonah Hauer-King), who have since entered a relationship.
West Hollywood is known for glitz, glamor and gay clubs, but “Idiotka” zeroes in on a section of the iconic L.A. neighborhood that rarely gets the same spotlight: the Russian immigrant district. Anna Baryshnikov stars as Margarita, who is on the brink of eviction from the tiny apartment she shares with her brother, father and grandmother when she gets cast on a reality show that could earn her enough money to save them all. But the show — with judges played by Julia Fox, Saweetie and Benito Skinner — pressures her to mine her trauma to get more screen time, leaving the whole family to wonder whether homelessness is the better option.
The romantic comedy “For Worse” tells an utterly charming coming-of-middle-age story about a newly divorced mom (Amy Landecker) who starts casually dating a much younger man (Nico Hiraga, “Booksmart”) in her commercial acting class. Landecker, who also makes her debut as a writer-director, assembled a killer cast, including Gaby Hoffmann, Ken Marino, Missi Pyle, Kiersey Clemons and her husband, Bradley Whitford.
The Real World Supplies Thrills and Chills
One of the most anticipated films coming into SXSW didn’t have any stars at all, unless you count Marco Rubio, Kirsten Gillibrand and the other lawmakers, military personnel and intelligence offers who appear in “The Age of Disclosure.” The film presents an effective catch-up on all of the U.S. government’s findings on UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena, the formal term for UFOs), as well as everything the CIA, Pentagon and other bodies have done to conceal that knowledge from the public.
When the thrilling parkour doc “We Are Storror” was first submitted to SXSW, it was without the name of the director; it was only after the programming team immediately said yes that they learned the director was Michael Bay. But even if you came for Bay, you stayed for Storror. The doc captures the U.K. parkour team who, not only risk their lives with their stunts, but also beautifully capture the footage. Not suitable for those afraid of heights and watched by much of the crowd through hands over their eyes, “We Are Storror” also managed to tell the personal, emotional family story of the team — in between life-risking stunts and the highest levels of athleticism.
“We Are Storror”; “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie”
Handout / SXSW; Jared Raab
The hiring of intimacy coordinators on film and TV sets continues to be a subject of debate even after several high-profile actors have come forward about the security they provide and the dangerous incidents they could have prevented in the past. But “Make It Look Real” closely follows the work of Australian intimacy coordinator Claire Warden, demonstrating the night-and-day difference her role can make for actors performing sex scenes.
Including “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” here is a bit of a cheat; while it does involve real people, “Borat”-style, it’s a mockumentary with zero facts or seriousness in sight. But the comedy, starring and directed by cult favorite Matt Johnson (“BlackBerry”), was SXSW’s biggest word-of-mouth hit. It follows two nobodies who try to get their band booked at the Rivoli, one of Toronto’s most iconic live music venues, and accidentally discover time travel in the process. The absurdism, 2008 humor and P. Diddy disses that ensue make up the funniest thing we saw in Austin. And with about a million copyright infringements, “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” may never screen in its current form again — the exact kind of weirdness that has always made this festival great.
