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Picture this: You’re in a meeting room at your tech company, and two people are having what looks like the same conversation about the same design problem. One is talking about whether the team has the right skills to tackle it. The other is diving deep into whether the solution actually solves the user’s problem. Same room, same problem, completely different lenses.

This is the beautiful, sometimes messy reality of having both a Design Manager and a Lead Designer on the same team. And if you’re wondering how to make this work without creating confusion, overlap, or the dreaded “too many cooks” scenario, you’re asking the right question.

The traditional answer has been to draw clean lines on an org chart. The Design Manager handles people, the Lead Designer handles craft. Problem solved, right? Except clean org charts are fantasy. In reality, both roles care deeply about team health, design quality, and shipping great work. 

The magic happens when you embrace the overlap instead of fighting it—when you start thinking of your design org as a design organism.

The Anatomy of a Healthy Design Team

Here’s what I’ve learned from years of being on both sides of this equation: think of your design team as a living organism. The Design Manager tends to the mind (the psychological safety, the career growth, the team dynamics). The Lead Designer tends to the body (the craft skills, the design standards, the hands-on work that ships to users).

But just like mind and body aren’t completely separate systems, so, too, do these roles overlap in important ways. You can’t have a healthy person without both working in harmony. The trick is knowing where those overlaps are and how to navigate them gracefully.

When we look at how healthy teams actually function, three critical systems emerge. Each requires both roles to work together, but with one taking primary responsibility for keeping that system strong.

The Nervous System: People & Psychology

Primary caretaker: Design Manager
Supporting role: Lead Designer

The nervous system is all about signals, feedback, and psychological safety. When this system is healthy, information flows freely, people feel safe to take risks, and the team can adapt quickly to new challenges.

The Design Manager is the primary caretaker here. They’re monitoring the team’s psychological pulse, ensuring feedback loops are healthy, and creating the conditions for people to grow. They’re hosting career conversations, managing workload, and making sure no one burns out.

But the Lead Designer plays a crucial supporting role. They’re providing sensory input about craft development needs, spotting when someone’s design skills are stagnating, and helping identify growth opportunities that the Design Manager might miss.

Design Manager tends to:

• Career conversations and growth planning
• Team psychological safety and dynamics
• Workload management and resource allocation
• Performance reviews and feedback systems
• Creating learning opportunities

Lead Designer supports by:

• Providing craft-specific feedback on team member development
• Identifying design skill gaps and growth opportunities
• Offering design mentorship and guidance
• Signaling when team members are ready for more complex challenges

The Muscular System: Craft & Execution

Primary caretaker: Lead Designer
Supporting role: Design Manager

The muscular system is about strength, coordination, and skill development. When this system is healthy, the team can execute complex design work with precision, maintain consistent quality, and adapt their craft to new challenges.

The Lead Designer is the primary caretaker here. They’re setting design standards, providing craft coaching, and ensuring that shipping work meets the quality bar. They’re the ones who can tell you if a design decision is sound or if we’re solving the right problem.

But the Design Manager plays a crucial supporting role. They’re ensuring the team has the resources and support to do their best craft work, like proper nutrition and recovery time for an athlete.

Lead Designer tends to:

• Definition of design standards and system usage
• Feedback on what design work meets the standard
• Experience direction for the product
• Design decisions and product-wide alignment
• Innovation and craft advancement

Design Manager supports by:

• Ensuring design standards are understood and adopted across the team
• Confirming experience direction is being followed
• Supporting practices and systems that scale without bottlenecking
• Facilitating design alignment across teams
• Providing resources and removing obstacles to great craft work

The Circulatory System: Strategy & Flow

Shared caretakers: Both Design Manager and Lead Designer

The circulatory system is about how information, decisions, and energy flow through the team. When this system is healthy, strategic direction is clear, priorities are aligned, and the team can respond quickly to new opportunities or challenges.

This is where true partnership happens. Both roles are responsible for keeping the circulation strong, but they’re bringing different perspectives to the table.

Lead Designer contributes:

• User needs are met by the product
• Overall product quality and experience
• Strategic design initiatives
• Research-based user needs for each initiative

Design Manager contributes:

• Communication to team and stakeholders
• Stakeholder management and alignment
• Cross-functional team accountability
• Strategic business initiatives

Both collaborate on:

• Co-creation of strategy with leadership
• Team goals and prioritization approach
• Organizational structure decisions
• Success measures and frameworks

Keeping the Organism Healthy

The key to making this partnership sing is understanding that all three systems need to work together. A team with great craft skills but poor psychological safety will burn out. A team with great culture but weak craft execution will ship mediocre work. A team with both but poor strategic circulation will work hard on the wrong things.

Be Explicit About Which System You’re Tending

When you’re in a meeting about a design problem, it helps to acknowledge which system you’re primarily focused on. “I’m thinking about this from a team capacity perspective” (nervous system) or “I’m looking at this through the lens of user needs” (muscular system) gives everyone context for your input.

This isn’t about staying in your lane. It’s about being transparent as to which lens you’re using, so the other person knows how to best add their perspective.

Create Healthy Feedback Loops

The most successful partnerships I’ve seen establish clear feedback loops between the systems:

Nervous system signals to muscular system: “The team is struggling with confidence in their design skills” → Lead Designer provides more craft coaching and clearer standards.

Muscular system signals to nervous system: “The team’s craft skills are advancing faster than their project complexity” → Design Manager finds more challenging growth opportunities.

Both systems signal to circulatory system: “We’re seeing patterns in team health and craft development that suggest we need to adjust our strategic priorities.”

Handle Handoffs Gracefully

The most critical moments in this partnership are when something moves from one system to another. This might be when a design standard (muscular system) needs to be rolled out across the team (nervous system), or when a strategic initiative (circulatory system) needs specific craft execution (muscular system).

Make these transitions explicit. “I’ve defined the new component standards. Can you help me think through how to get the team up to speed?” or “We’ve agreed on this strategic direction. I’m going to focus on the specific user experience approach from here.”

Stay Curious, Not Territorial

The Design Manager who never thinks about craft, or the Lead Designer who never considers team dynamics, is like a doctor who only looks at one body system. Great design leadership requires both people to care about the whole organism, even when they’re not the primary caretaker.

This means asking questions rather than making assumptions. “What do you think about the team’s craft development in this area?” or “How do you see this impacting team morale and workload?” keeps both perspectives active in every decision.

When the Organism Gets Sick

Even with clear roles, this partnership can go sideways. Here are the most common failure modes I’ve seen:

System Isolation

The Design Manager focuses only on the nervous system and ignores craft development. The Lead Designer focuses only on the muscular system and ignores team dynamics. Both people retreat to their comfort zones and stop collaborating.

The symptoms: Team members get mixed messages, work quality suffers, morale drops.

The treatment: Reconnect around shared outcomes. What are you both trying to achieve? Usually it’s great design work that ships on time from a healthy team. Figure out how both systems serve that goal.

Poor Circulation

Strategic direction is unclear, priorities keep shifting, and neither role is taking responsibility for keeping information flowing.

The symptoms: Team members are confused about priorities, work gets duplicated or dropped, deadlines are missed.

The treatment: Explicitly assign responsibility for circulation. Who’s communicating what to whom? How often? What’s the feedback loop?

Autoimmune Response

One person feels threatened by the other’s expertise. The Design Manager thinks the Lead Designer is undermining their authority. The Lead Designer thinks the Design Manager doesn’t understand craft.

The symptoms: Defensive behavior, territorial disputes, team members caught in the middle.

The treatment: Remember that you’re both caretakers of the same organism. When one system fails, the whole team suffers. When both systems are healthy, the team thrives.

The Payoff

Yes, this model requires more communication. Yes, it requires both people to be secure enough to share responsibility for team health. But the payoff is worth it: better decisions, stronger teams, and design work that’s both excellent and sustainable.

When both roles are healthy and working well together, you get the best of both worlds: deep craft expertise and strong people leadership. When one person is out sick, on vacation, or overwhelmed, the other can help maintain the team’s health. When a decision requires both the people perspective and the craft perspective, you’ve got both right there in the room.

Most importantly, the framework scales. As your team grows, you can apply the same system thinking to new challenges. Need to launch a design system? Lead Designer tends to the muscular system (standards and implementation), Design Manager tends to the nervous system (team adoption and change management), and both tend to circulation (communication and stakeholder alignment).

The Bottom Line

The relationship between a Design Manager and Lead Designer isn’t about dividing territories. It’s about multiplying impact. When both roles understand they’re tending to different aspects of the same healthy organism, magic happens.

The mind and body work together. The team gets both the strategic thinking and the craft excellence they need. And most importantly, the work that ships to users benefits from both perspectives.

So the next time you’re in that meeting room, wondering why two people are talking about the same problem from different angles, remember: you’re watching shared leadership in action. And if it’s working well, both the mind and body of your design team are getting stronger.

“Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a totally coherent system bound to context and behavior.” — Kenneth L. Pike

The web has accents. So should our design systems.

Design Systems as Living Languages

Design systems aren’t component libraries—they’re living languages. Tokens are phonemes, components are words, patterns are phrases, layouts are sentences. The conversations we build with users become the stories our products tell.

But here’s what we’ve forgotten: the more fluently a language is spoken, the more accents it can support without losing meaning. English in Scotland differs from English in Sydney, yet both are unmistakably English. The language adapts to context while preserving core meaning. This couldn’t be more obvious to me, a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, who learned English with an American accent, and lives in Sydney.

Our design systems must work the same way. Rigid adherence to visual rules creates brittle systems that break under contextual pressure. Fluent systems bend without breaking.

Consistency becomes a prison

The promise of design systems was simple: consistent components would accelerate development and unify experiences. But as systems matured and products grew more complex, that promise has become a prison. Teams file “exception” requests by the hundreds. Products launch with workarounds instead of system components. Designers spend more time defending consistency than solving user problems.

Our design systems must learn to speak dialects.

A design dialect is a systematic adaptation of a design system that maintains core principles while developing new patterns for specific contexts. Unlike one-off customizations or brand themes, dialects preserve the system’s essential grammar while expanding its vocabulary to serve different users, environments, or constraints.

When Perfect Consistency Fails

At Booking.com, I learned this lesson the hard way. We A/B-tested everything—color, copy, button shapes, even logo colors. As a professional with a graphic design education and experience building brand style guides, I found this shocking. While everyone fell in love with Airbnb’s pristine design system, Booking grew into a giant without ever considering visual consistency.  

The chaos taught me something profound: consistency isn’t ROI; solved problems are.

At Shopify. Polaris () was our crown jewel—a mature design language perfect for merchants on laptops. As a product team, we were expected to adopt Polaris as-is. Then my fulfillment team hit an “Oh, Ship!” moment, as we faced the challenge of building an app for warehouse pickers using our interface on shared, battered Android scanners in dim aisles, wearing thick gloves, scanning dozens of items per minute, many with limited levels of English understanding.

Task completion with standard Polaris: 0%.

Every component that worked beautifully for merchants failed completely for pickers. White backgrounds created glare. 44px tap targets were invisible to gloved fingers. Sentence-case labels took too long to parse. Multi-step flows confused non-native speakers.

We faced a choice: abandon Polaris entirely, or teach it to speak warehouse.

The Birth of a Dialect

We chose evolution over revolution. Working within Polaris’s core principles—clarity, efficiency, consistency—we developed what we now call a design dialect:

Constraint	Fluent Move	Rationale
Glare & low light	Dark surfaces + light text	Reduce glare on low-DPI screens
Gloves & haste	90px tap targets (~2cm)	Accommodate thick gloves
Multilingual	Single-task screens, plain language	Reduce cognitive load

Result: Task completion jumped from 0% to 100%. Onboarding time dropped from three weeks to one shift.

This wasn’t customization or theming—this was a dialect: a systematic adaptation that maintained Polaris’s core grammar while developing new vocabulary for a specific context. Polaris hadn’t failed; it had learned to speak warehouse.

The Flexibility Framework

At Atlassian, working on the Jira platform—itself a system within the larger Atlassian system—I pushed for formalizing this insight. With dozens of products sharing a design language across different codebases, we needed systematic flexibility so we built directly into our ways of working. The old model—exception requests and special approvals—was failing at scale.

We developed the Flexibility Framework to help designers define how flexible they wanted their components to be:

Tier	Action	Ownership
Consistent	Adopt unchanged	Platform locks design + code
Opinionated	Adapt within bounds	Platform provides smart defaults, products customize
Flexible	Extend freely	Platform defines behavior, products own presentation

During a navigation redesign, we tiered every element. Logo and global search stayed Consistent. Breadcrumbs and contextual actions became Flexible. Product teams could immediately see where innovation was welcome and where consistency mattered.

The Decision Ladder

Flexibility needs boundaries. We created a simple ladder for evaluating when rules should bend:

Good: Ship with existing system components. Fast, consistent, proven.

Better: Stretch a component slightly. Document the change. Contribute improvements back to the system for all to use.

Best: Prototype the ideal experience first. If user testing validates the benefit, update the system to support it.

The key question: “Which option lets users succeed fastest?”

Rules are tools, not relics.

Unity Beats Uniformity

Gmail, Drive, and Maps are unmistakably Google—yet each speaks with its own accent. They achieve unity through shared principles, not cloned components. One extra week of debate over button color costs roughly $30K in engineer time.

Unity is a brand outcome; fluency is a user outcome. When the two clash, side with the user.

Governance Without Gates

How do you maintain coherence while enabling dialects? Treat your system like a living vocabulary:

Document every deviation – e.g., dialects/warehouse.md with before/after screenshots and rationale.

Promote shared patterns – when three teams adopt a dialect independently, review it for core inclusion.

Deprecate with context – retire old idioms via flags and migration notes, never a big-bang purge.

A living dictionary scales better than a frozen rulebook.

Start Small: Your First Dialect

Ready to introduce dialects? Start with one broken experience:

This week: Find one user flow where perfect consistency blocks task completion. Could be mobile users struggling with desktop-sized components, or accessibility needs your standard patterns don’t address.

Document the context: What makes standard patterns fail here? Environmental constraints? User capabilities? Task urgency?

Design one systematic change: Focus on behavior over aesthetics. If gloves are the problem, bigger targets aren’t “”breaking the system””—they’re serving the user. Earn the variations and make them intentional.

Test and measure: Does the change improve task completion? Time to productivity? User satisfaction?

Show the savings: If that dialect frees even half a sprint, fluency has paid for itself.

Beyond the Component Library

We’re not managing design systems anymore—we’re cultivating design languages. Languages that grow with their speakers. Languages that develop accents without losing meaning. Languages that serve human needs over aesthetic ideals.

The warehouse workers who went from 0% to 100% task completion didn’t care that our buttons broke the style guide. They cared that the buttons finally worked.

Your users feel the same way. Give your system permission to speak their language.

Today’s web is not always an amiable place. Sites greet you with a popover that demands assent to their cookie policy, and leave you with Taboola ads promising “One Weird Trick!” to cure your ailments. Social media sites are tuned for engagement, and few things are more engaging than a fight. Today it seems that people want to quarrel; I have seen flame wars among birders.  

These tensions are often at odds with a site’s goals. If we are providing support and advice to customers, we don’t want those customers to wrangle with each other. If we offer news about the latest research, we want readers to feel at ease; if we promote upcoming marches, we want our core supporters to feel comfortable and we want curious newcomers to feel welcome. 

In a study for a conference on the History of the Web, I looked to the origins of Computer Science in Vienna (1928-1934)  for a case study of the importance of amiability in a research community and the disastrous consequences of its loss. That story has interesting implications for web environments that promote amiable interaction among disparate, difficult (and sometimes disagreeable) people.

The Vienna Circle

Though people had been thinking about calculating engines and thinking machines from antiquity, Computing really got going in Depression-era Vienna.  The people who worked out the theory had no interest in building machines; they wanted to puzzle out the limits of reason in the absence of divine authority. If we could not rely on God or Aristotle to tell us how to think, could we instead build arguments that were self-contained and demonstrably correct? Can we be sure that mathematics is consistent? Are there things that are true but that cannot be expressed in language? 

The core ideas were worked out in the weekly meetings (Thursdays at 6) of a group remembered as the Vienna Circle. They got together in the office of Professor Moritz Schlick at the University of Vienna to discuss problems in philosophy, math, and language. The intersection of physics and philosophy had long been a specialty of this Vienna department, and this work had placed them among the world leaders.  Schlick’s colleague Hans Hahn was a central participant, and by 1928 Hahn brought along his graduate students Karl Menger and Kurt Gödel. Other frequent participants included philosopher Rudolf Carnap, psychologist Karl Popper, economist Ludwig von Mises (brought by his brother Frederick, a physicist),  graphic designer Otto Neurath (inventor of infographics), and architect Josef Frank (brought by his physicist brother, Phillip).  Out-of-town visitors often joined, including the young Johnny von Neumann, Alfred Tarski, and the irascible Ludwig Wittgenstein. 

When Schlick’s office grew too dim, participants adjourned to a nearby café for additional discussion with an even larger circle of participants.  This convivial circle was far from unique.  An intersecting circle–Neurath, von Mises, Oskar Morgenstern–established the Austrian School of free-market economics. There were theatrical circles (Peter Lorre, Hedy Lamarr, Max Reinhardt), and literary circles. The café was where things happened.

The interdisciplinarity of the group posed real challenges of temperament and understanding. Personalities were often a challenge. Gödel was convinced people were trying to poison him. Architect Josef Frank depended on contracts for public housing, which Mises opposed as wasteful. Wittgenstein’s temper had lost him his job as a secondary school teacher, and for some of these years he maintained a detailed list of whom he was willing to meet. Neurath was eager to detect muddled thinking and would interrupt a speaker with a shouted “Metaphysics!” The continuing amity of these meetings was facilitated by the personality of their leader, Moritz Schlick, who would be remembered as notably adept in keeping disagreements from becoming quarrels.

In the Café

The Viennese café of this era was long remembered as a particularly good place to argue with your friends, to read, and to write. Built to serve an imperial capital, the cafés found themselves with too much space and too few customers now that the Empire was gone. There was no need to turn tables: a café could only survive by coaxing customers to linger. Perhaps they would order another coffee, or one of their friends might drop by. One could play chess, or billiards, or read newspapers from abroad. Coffee was invariably served with a glass of purified spring water, still a novelty in an era in which most water was still unsafe to drink. That water glass would be refilled indefinitely. 

In the basement of one café, the poet Jura Soyfer staged “The End Of The World,” a musical comedy in which Professor Peep has discovered a comet heading for earth.

Prof. Peep: The comet is going to destroy everybody!

Hitler:  Destroying everybody is my business.

Of course, coffee can be prepared in many ways, and the Viennese café developed a broad vocabulary to represent precisely how one preferred to drink it: melange, Einspänner, Brauner, Schwarzer, Kapuziner. This extensive customization, with correspondingly esoteric conventions of service, established the café as a comfortable and personal third space, a neutral ground in which anyone who could afford a coffee would be welcome. Viennese of this era were fastidious in their use of personal titles, of which an abundance were in common use. Café waiters greeted regular customers with titles too, but were careful to address their patrons with titles a notch or two greater than they deserved. A graduate student would be Doktor, an unpaid postdoc Professor.  This assurance mattered all the more because so many members of the Circle (and so many other Viennese) came from elsewhere: Carnap from Wuppertal, Gödel from Brno, von Neumann from Budapest. No one was going to make fun of your clothes, mannerisms, or accent. Your friends wouldn’t be bothered by the pram in the hall. Everyone shared a Germanic Austrian literary and philosophical culture, not least those whose ancestors had been Eastern European Jews who knew that culture well, having read all about it in books.

The amiability of the café circle was enhanced by its openness. Because the circle sometimes extended to architects and actors, people could feel less constrained to admit shortfalls in their understanding. It was soon discovered that marble tabletops made a useful surface for pencil sketches, serving all as an improvised and accessible blackboard.

Comedies like “The End Of The World” and fictional newspaper sketches or feuilletons of writers like Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig served as a second defense against disagreeable or churlish behavior. The knowledge that, if one got carried away, a parody of one’s remarks might shortly appear in Neue Freie Presse surely helped Professor Schlick keep matters in hand.

The End Of Red Vienna

Though Austria’s government drifted to the right after the War, Vienna’s city council had been Socialist, dedicated to public housing based on user-centered design, and embracing  ambitious programs of public outreach and adult education. In 1934 the Socialists lost a local election, and this era soon came to its end as the new administration focused on the imagined threat of the International Jewish Conspiracy. Most members of the Circle fled within months: von Neumann to Princeton, Neurath to Holland and Oxford, Popper to New Zealand, Carnap to Chicago. Prof. Schlick was murdered on the steps of the University by a student outraged by his former association with Jews.  Jura Soyfer, who wrote “The End Of The World,” died in Buchenwald.

In 1939, von Neumann finally convinced Gödel to accept a job in Princeton. Gödel was required to pay large fines to emigrate. The officer in charge of these fees would look back on this as the best posting of his career; his name was Eichmann.

Design for Amiability

An impressive literature recounts those discussions and the environment that facilitated the development of computing. How can we design for amiability?  This is not just a matter of choosing rounded typefaces and a cheerful pastel palette. I believe we may identify eight distinct issues that exert design forces in usefully amiable directions.

Seriousness: The Vienna Circle was wrestling with a notoriously difficult book—Wittgenstein’s Tractus Logico-Philosophicus—and a catalog of outstanding open questions in mathematics. They were concerned with consequential problems, not merely scoring points for debating. Constant reminders that the questions you are considering matter—not only that they are consequential or that those opposing you are scoundrels—help promote amity.

Empiricism: The characteristic approach of the Vienna Circle demanded that knowledge be grounded either in direct observation or in rigorous reasoning. Disagreement, when it arose, could be settled by observation or by proof. If neither seemed ready to hand, the matter could not be settled. On these terms, one can seldom if ever demolish an opposing argument, and trolling is pointless.

Abstraction: Disputes grow worse when losing the argument entails lost face or lost jobs. The Vienna Circle’s focus on theory—the limits of mathematics, the capability of language—promoted amity. Without seriousness, abstraction could have been merely academic, but the limits of reason and the consistency of mathematics were clearly serious.

Formality: The punctilious demeanor of waiters and the elaborated rituals of coffee service helped to establish orderly attitudes amongst the argumentative participants. This stands in contrast to the contemptuous sneer that now dominates social media.  

Schlamperei: Members of the Vienna Circle maintained a global correspondence, and they knew their work was at the frontier of research. Still, this was Vienna, at the margins of Europe: old-fashioned, frumpy, and dingy. Many participants came from even more obscure backwaters. Most or all harbored the suspicion that they were really schleppers, and a tinge of the ridiculous helped to moderate tempers. The director of “The End Of The World” had to pass the hat for money to purchase a moon for the set, and thought it was funny enough to write up for publication.

Openness: All sorts of people were involved in discussion, anyone might join in. Each week would bring different participants. Fluid borders reduce tension, and provide opportunities to broaden the range of discussion and the terms of engagement. Low entrance friction was characteristic of the café: anyone could come, and if you came twice you were virtually a regular. Permeable boundaries and café culture made it easier for moderating influences to draw in raconteurs and storytellers to defuse awkward moments, and Vienna’s cafés had no shortage of humorists. Openness counteracts the suspicion that promoters of amiability are exerting censorship.

Parody: The environs of the Circle—the university office and the café—were unmistakably public. There were writers about, some of them renowned humorists. The prospect that one’s bad taste or bad behavior might be ridiculed in print kept discussion within bounds. The sanction of public humiliation, however, was itself made mild by the veneer of fiction; even if you got a little carried away and a character based on you made a splash in some newspaper fiction, it wasn’t the end of the world.

Engagement: The subject matter was important to the participants, but it was esoteric: it did not matter very much to their mothers or their siblings. A small stumble or a minor humiliation could be shrugged off in ways that major media confrontations cannot.

I believe it is notable that this environment was designed to promote amiability through several different voices.  The café waiter flattered each newcomer and served everyone, and also kept out local pickpockets and drunks who would be mere disruptions. Schlick and other regulars kept discussion moving and on track. The fiction writers and raconteurs—perhaps the most peripheral of the participants—kept people in a good mood and reminded them that bad behavior could make anyone ridiculous.  Crucially, each of these voices were human: you could reason with them. Algorithmic or AI moderators, however clever, are seldom perceived as reasonable. The café circles had no central authority or Moderator against whom everyone’s resentments might be focused. Even after the disaster of 1934, what people remembered were those cheerful arguments.

This article contains Project Hail Mary spoilers. The hype around Project Hail Mary was building for quite a while before its release. Fans of Andy Weir’s bestselling sci-fi novel were very excited to see its big-screen adaptation, which also marks the first feature film directed by Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse producers Phil Lord and Christopher […]

The post Rocky’s Voice Decision Makes Project Hail Mary Even More Brilliant appeared first on Den of Geek.

The braintrusts that have presided over SXSW since nearly its inception have always smiled on the festival for its contrasts. It’s a fest where south meets west, and music meets film, meets technology, meets comedy, meets plain ol’ innovation. And in no other year has that felt more like a lived-in ethos than 2026, which saw everything happening everywhere and all at once (heh).

With the film, TV, music, activation, and cornucopia of other moments all occurring simultaneously in Austin, it was a whirlwind that can nearly overwhelm. Yet the Den of Geek team was there for almost all of it, covering what we can, and bringing it to you in this handy, dandy round-up.

Movies

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist

At the turn of the century, the world was excited by the prospect of new technology. The internet was a shiny toy, the dot com bubble hadn’t burst, and the iPod (never mind the iPhone) was still a glint in Steve Jobs’ eye. Filmmaker Daniel Kwan and technology ethicist Tristan Harris remember those days as a bit like a lost kingdom. After all, the world it has wrought has very little good cheer left in the public for new tech, especially with the AI revolution that is now commencing.

“With social media, we were not great stewards of that technology and how it rolled out,” Harris observes in the Den of Geek studio. “We created the most anxious and depressed generation of our lifetime, even though some of the people who were building it—the people who started Instagram, they were my dorm mates at Stanford—they didn’t intend for that to happen.” Which raises the question of why should folks have any confidence that many of the same companies and technology leaders will do better with the far more powerful prospect of artificial intelligence.

That conundrum is something which both men are confronting in the new Daniel Roher documentary, The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which Kwan is also a producer on. As the title suggests, the film examines both the most pessimistic and rosiest predictions for AI’s future, and everything in between. All possibilities are running rampant in Silicon Valley while billion-dollar companies dash madly toward being the first to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Yet the film also interrogates what tools can be put in place to create better stewards in the next generation. As Oscar-winner Kwan notes, “I think Big Tech has broken our social contract that we have as a society with technology. They have used our world as a playground to basically consolidate more power and more resources. The technology that they’re building—even though a lot of the architects and the technicians building this stuff, they have the greatest intentions and the greatest ideals of what this technology can do—the fact that it is being deployed within this current system, within this current incentive structure, it is taking a neutral technology and turning it into an extractive one.” – David Crow

Amazing Live Sea Monkeys

As the large, colorful gates open to Yolanda Signorelli’s Maryland estate, she’s without electricity, feeding woodland creatures tiny crackers – an unexpectedly intimate introduction to the woman at the center of The Amazing Live Sea Monkeys. Directed by Mark Becker and Aaron Schock, the documentary uses the nostalgia of comic books and the ‘60s to showcase an oddly complex legal saga and the history of the beloved “instant life” toy while uncovering lesser-known details about its creator, Harold von Braunhut. At its core is a David-and-Goliath-style battle between Signorelli, often called the “mother of Sea-Monkeys,” and Big Time Toys, which began licensing and distributing the product in 2007.

Through interviews with Signorelli, her lawyer, journalists, former collaborators, and illustrators behind the brand’s imagery, the film tells the story while keeping the people behind it at the center. Signorelli’s love for animals and the sea monkeys shine through all aspects of the film; Schock even told us that revealing the “sea monkey secret formula” was always a concern of Signorelli while filming. Throughout the documentary, Becker and Schock never shy away from examining von Braunhut’s various controversies in vivid detail. At the same time, the filmmakers didn’t want to lump Signorelli and her passion into the worst of what her former husband had done. It was complex, captivating, and perfectly fit for a SXSW premiere. – Darcie Zudell

American Dollhouse

John Valley doesn’t want to reinvent cinema with his movie, American Dollhouse. The story of a struggling woman named Sarah (Hailley Laurèn), who inherits her childhood home only to be beset by unstable neighbor Kelly (Kelsey Pribilski), follows in the tradition of horror greats, including Psycho, Peeping Tom, and Black Christmas. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have bigger things on its mind.

“I’m obsessed with how a slasher can be minimalist, but yet a container for huge, modern ideas,” Valley tells Den of Geek. “I stuck to the conventions and tropes, and kept telling the cast that it’s just a meat and potatoes slasher film, but we also tried to find some new, modern life in it.”

Part of that work fell on Pribilski, who had to embody an adult who has reverted to a childlike state in frightening ways. “I thought about how an eight-year-old acts. They’re a little bit animated because we as adults have learned to contain our emotions,” Pribilski reveals. “It was about knowing when to go bigger. We had to choose very carefully the moments for me to go into ‘grizzly bear’ mode, as John would call it.”

As Pribilski got to play big moments, it fell on her co-star Laurèn to keep things grounded in reality. “Sarah is a full person, and it was important to me that, when she makes a decision, it doesn’t come out of nowhere,” she says. That approach makes Sarah a formidable opponent, even for a killer as strange as Kelly. “Sarah’s a loyal fighter, for herself and the people she loves. She’s not going to just go down.”

Thanks to the work of Pribilski and Lauren, American Dollhouse adds a great new killer and final girl to the slasher tradition. – Joe George

Black Zombie

In a pop culture saturated with zombie shows like The Walking Dead and The Last of Us, many have forgotten the roots of Z-culture. Writer-director Maya Annik Bedward is not one of them. Right down to the title of Black Zombie conjuring the racist shadow of the nearly century-old Hollywood film White Zombie (1932), Bedward’s haunting documentary looks at more than a hundred years of appropriation, reinvention, and evolution of a concept that’s rooted in the vast sweep of African diaspora, and the Black Haitian experience of revolution in particular.

“In Haiti, everyone knows about the zombie, and in Haiti, stories of zombies and zombification are regularly talked about,” says Bedward. “It’s adjacent to vodou, but it’s not an everyday practice. Zombification is these stories of ‘I saw zombies in the field,’ and very connected to these ideas of enslavement.” These are the roots which inspired the white fiction that in turn gave the world their beloved modern flesh-easters. Black Zombie observes, critiques, and even at times celebrates this transition—within limits as the othered monster has increasingly become a symbol for tearing down sinister systems. Or just a fear of the status quo breaking… – DC

Brian 

Multiple castmates in Will Ropp’s directorial debut, Brian, were student body presidents in high school; a connection they didn’t make until SXSW. Ben Wang, who plays the titular character running for student body president to impress his crush, says he drew from his own awkward quirks when portraying the role. Edi Patterson and Randall Park play Wang’s parents, who care a little too much that their son finally made a friend. William H. Macy, who plays Brian’s therapist, talks Brian through his various panic attacks and struggles with mental health that cause him to lose roles in drama club, freak out his classmates, and annoy his friends. Meanwhile, his cool English teacher, portrayed by Natalie Morales, just wants to help Brian develop his party platform without indulging his inappropriate attraction to her. 

It’s a coming of age movie about mental health and the messy aspects of high school, but even more than that, the script by Mike Scollins is effortlessly funny in a way that will have you quoting Patterson’s and Park’s one-liners long after the first watch. Speaking of Patterson and Park, they got to have a lot of fun improvising during some dining room table scenes. Brian’s a good time, but one that will yank its audiences’ right back to high school in a visceral and emotional way.  – DZ 

Chasing Summer

Directed by Josephine Decker and written by leading lady, Iliza Shlesinger, Chasing Summer is a romantic comedy that is sexy, realistic, and overwhelmingly nostalgic. 

Jamie (Shlesinger) returns to her Texas hometown after a breakup, shocked to find that while the small hamlet may look the same, the people within it have changed. She picks up her old job at the roller rink, now owned by her sister (Cassidy Freeman), and meets Harper (Lola Tung), her young co-worker. Harper convinces Jamie to attend a party, where she meets a much younger Colby (Garrett Wareing). The two pursue a questionable fling while Jamie rekindles relationships with old high school classmates, including her ex-boyfriend, Chase (Tom Welling). The rest of the story is a sticky recreation of summer love that invokes the refreshing feeling of stepping into AC.

At times predictable, the film also has moments of shock, including a soap-opera-level reveal that will leave middle-aged women everywhere swooning. It is a retrospective on summers of days past, and the inevitability of moving on. It’s conventional, easy, and delivers the promise of a classic romcom. – Alexandra Hopkins

Crash Land 

What happens when a group of amateur stuntmen try to make a “real movie” so they can prove their worth to a town that hates them? Crash Land, directed by Dempsey Bryk, answers that very question. 

“It came out of COVID,” Bryk says. “I was stuck with my brother and my entire family… living behind the couches in the living room, as you do, and I was watching this Jackass marathon on loop and the idea blossomed out of there.” The film evokes classics of the genre – think Napoleon Dynamite, Superbad, and Bottle Rocket – against a Canadian backdrop of charming chaos. 

“There was a process of trying to make it not like anything else after being so inspired your entire life by the things you love, and then you have to try to find your own voice,” Bryk says. 

As Crash Land follows this group of boys becoming men one wipeout at a time, it simultaneously tells another coming of age story. The spirit behind Crash Land is the much more successful story of Dempsey Bryk and his brother Billy, who plays the emotional catalyst of the movie. Through his influence, the characters crash and land in a world that is fun, endearing, and unexpectedly touching. – Sophia Rooksberry 

Drag

Horror movies often tend to revolve around similar, oftentimes outlandish, concepts: A deranged killer, a disturbing monster, a haunted setting. But Drag, the debut feature film from Raviv Ullman and Greg Yagolnitzer, finds a scary story in an everyday, all-too-human problem. Yes, it’s a movie that’s really about the terrifying specter of lower back pain. 

The film stars Lizzy Caplan and Lucy DeVito as a pair of frequently-at-odds siblings who find themselves in increasing trouble during a house robbery gone wrong. When one of the pair throws their back out mid-heist, the other must help her escape by dragging her from the house’s upstairs bathroom down to the waiting car. Painfully uncomfortable (and often downright grisly) acts of body horror ensue, with plenty of gross-out details in full close-up even as they discover that the man they’ve come to rob is not everything he appears to be. – Lacy Baugher

Drift 

SXSW needs an Action Documentary screening section solely for Drift to exist in. Described by director Deon Taylor as a real life Catch Me If You Can, the documentary stars real-life action hero Isaac Wright as he recounts his career going to unprecedented heights for his art.

“The documentary is a lot more than just my artwork,” Wright says. “It has to do with my life and what I feel like my artwork really represents and a full portrait of what I think the goal of life is.” 

Under the artist name Drift, he climbs to the very top of the country’s tallest buildings capturing the most breathtaking and adrenaline-spiking photos, slowly working toward his dream of summiting the Empire State Building. 

“We went to the Instagram and these beautiful photos are just so captivating that it’s really overwhelming, and wondering why the hell he’s up there and what he’s doing was my initial reaction,” Roxanne Avent Taylor, the film’s producer, says. 

The documentary answers those questions in an exploration of the human spirit, as the occasional illegality of Drift’s climbs resulted in a multi-year battle with law enforcement across multiple states. 

“I believed that everyone could connect to the human story based on the fact that we’ve all been through something,” Taylor says. “We’ve all been misrepresented or someone has tried to tear down your character in some way.” 

On its surface, Drift is an action thriller come to life. At its core, Drift is a tear-jearking testament to a freedom that only the birds and the film’s namesake have experienced. – SR

Family Movie

When watching Family Movie, a chipper-oddball indie directed by Kevin Bacon and starring Kevin Bacon, as well as wife Kyra Sedgwick, daughter Sosie Bacon, and son Travis Bacon, one gets the sense that this is not what a real family flick with the Bacons would look like. At least you’d hope so! But given how mirthful this splatter-comedy is when their fictional doppelgängers are forced to deal with a murderer on the set of their horror movie-within-a-horror movie, you nonetheless feel like you’re sitting across from the gang during a lively game night.

“I think the movie definitely reflects on all our personalities individually and how we relate to each other,” Travis explains. “There’s definitely some little moments like that, but we’re still acting.”

Kevin later adds that screenwriter Dan Beers was able to collect some surprisingly accurate depictions of interpersonal dynamics after interviewing them each separately. Says the director: “When we got the first draft of the script, we were like, ‘Holy shit, how did you know that?!’ And it’s not like it’s pieces of dirt… it’s just ways of being.” – DC

Forbidden Fruits

A title like Forbidden Fruits suggests a heavy drama, thick with Biblical overtones and meditations on the nature of sin. Yet, one look at the new movie starring Lili Reinhart as the leader of a witch cult of mall girls promises the exact opposite, presenting itself as a spunky horror comedy.

However, according to director Meredith Alloway, religion weighs heavily on the story. “I love the idea that women are told that we’re quite literally the origin of evil and sin,” Alloway tells Den of Geek, a theme that goes all the way to the source material, the play “Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die” by Lily Houghton, who cowrote the screenplay with Alloway. 

Alloway continues, “When I read the play, I see all these women reclaiming that. Witchcraft and being in a coven are ways to make that narrative ours. I think when women get together and set an intention, whether it’s magic or literally just talking at a sleepover, that is really powerful.”

As Apple, Reinhart gathers a team of women to join her coven, including Lola Tung as Pumpkin, Victoria Pedretti as Cherry, and Alexandra Shipp as Fig,” all characters who are more than they initially appear. 

“No one’s playing a stereotype,” says Pedretti. “There are a lot of cues that might lead you to misjudge these women before you get to know them. Each character ends up surprising the audience with their humanity.”

“I think we all play very complex human individuals who just so happen to be born in a female body in this lifetime, who are trying to navigate the structures of our world,” adds Shipp.

In other words, the characters are richer and more complicated than one might think, just like Forbidden Fruits itself. – JG

The Fox 

Ever wanted to get in bed with a fox voiced by Olivia Colman? Well, Jai Courtney got to in Dario Russo’s The Fox, a magical realism comedy about what happens when people try to change themselves for their partners. Emily Browning reluctantly agrees to marry Courtney’s character, Nick, while secretly having an affair with her boss (Damon Herriman), who is also cheating on his wife (Claudia Doumit). In an effort to win their partner back, Nick listens to a fox he was moments away from killing in the woods, leading all the characters down a hole where they literally lose themselves. 

Russo directed, wrote, and scored The Fox, so naturally he had a very specific vision for the fantasy and comedy elements of the film. Russo says he finds it really annoying when characters in films deliver an over-exaggerated reaction to talking animals, so in this universe, talking foxes are the least out-of-the-ordinary thing. Though they didn’t really act alongside Colman, Doumit and Browning were obsessed with her narration; Browning says she listened to a recording of Colman’s voice acting over and over again on a run one time. The film is as ambitious as it is mystical, but it never loses its ability to make fun of the chaos and camp of it all. – DZ

He Bled Neon

With all its neon lights and gleeful indulgence of vice, Las Vegas has always made for a popular movie setting. Still, Vegas-native and He Bled Neon producer Nate Bolotin felt there was a certain kind of movie that Sin City had not yet played host to. 

“Twenty years ago, my step brother and best friend passed away. I got a text message from a mutual friend, just like how it happens in the movie actually, and had to go back and bury him and reconnect with the people that I had lost touch with. Someone came up to me at the funeral and said ‘hey, I think there’s some foul player here’ but we never went too deep. Fifteen years later or so it just clicked: we haven’t seen a Vegas revenge noir thriller in a world outside the Vegas strip.”

True to Bolotin’s real life experiences, He Bled Neon picks up with successful businessman Ethan (Joe Cole) receiving the fateful text and returning home to Las Vegas where he reconnects with his old crew (which includes characters played by Marshawn Lynch, Rita Ora, and Ismael Cruz Cordova) and begins to unpack the mystery of his brother Darren’s (Paul Wesley) death.

He Bled Neon aces the set-up, largely thanks to the colorful sensibilities of director Drew Kirsch and electronic soundscapes of composers Joe Trapanese and DJ Zhu. Once the revenge plot moves into the desert and grimy environs outside the strip, however, the film loses its distinctive sense of place and settles into a disappointingly conventional crime story. – Alec Bojalad

Hokum

Irish filmmaker Damian McCarthy became a SXSW Midnighter hero when 2024’s Oddity took home the festival’s Audience Award. Now he’s returned to Austin with some extra star power in tow. The horror auteur’s next spooky effort, Hokum, stars Severance’s Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman, an American novelist who absconds to a remote Irish inn to scatter his parents’ ashes and finish his latest book. Of course, it just so happens that this particular inn contains a honeymoon suite that is said to be haunted by an ancient witch…

Speaking of hauntings, Hokum’s first act is haunted by a weak characterization of Scott’s Ohm, whose lifetime of unaddressed grief has apparently manifested itself as a need to be a real dick. Once the movie gives way to the charismatic actor’s charm and McCarthy begins to flex his horror muscles, the back half blossoms into a pleasingly macabre experience. It’s also quite dark. Literally. 

“It’s dark in the film, and it was literally dark when we were in there making it,” Scott told Den of Geek. “It was pretty clear that this was going to be unsettling. As an actor, since your control is limited, you never know really how something is going to turn out at the end of the day. Having so much faith in Damian and seeing all the components they put together on set, I knew there was a chance that this could work.”  And indeed Hokum does work. – AB

I Love Boosters

Three projects into his burgeoning film career, it’s fair to say that Boots Riley has developed a house style. For a lesser creative, that level of one-note fixation might begin to grow stale. Thankfully, the marriage of the surreal with leftist politics is a note that this rapper, songwriter, and record-producer-turned-filmmaker knows how to play quite well. And he continues to do so in I Love Boosters.

Keke Palmer stars as Corvette, an aspiring fashion designer who ekes out a living as a “booster,” pinching high-end textiles and selling them to her neighborhood at a discount. Together with her friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), Corvette sets her booster sights on high-end fashion entrepreneur Christie Smith (Demi Moore) to close the fashion gap between the haves and have-nots.

Like Sorry to Bother You before it, I Love Boosters’ premise is merely a jumping off point for all the vivid imagery and offbeat twists to come. The movie that a ticket-buyer expects to see at minute 0 is very much not the movie they experience by minute 60 or so. Unlike Sorry to Bother You, however, Boosters’ absurdist twist isn’t a completely out-of-left-field human-animal hybrid situation but a far more mundane science fiction tool that we won’t spoil. Despite the relatively conventional sci-fi trappings of its back half, I Love Boosters feels satisfyingly anarchic and bizarre all the way through. – AB

Imposters 

The idea of changelings, body snatchers, or other false creatures that are somehow swapped into existing families without any of their members being the wiser is nightmare fuel from time immemorial. Imposters takes this idea and runs with it, crafting a story that wrestles with ideas of parenthood, commitment, and fear. 

The film stars Jessica Rothe and Charlie Barnett as Paul and Marie, a couple forced to contend with any parent’s worst nightmare when their baby mysteriously disappears. While everyone is convinced the resident Town Creep is responsible, Marie’s not so sure, and when she turns to the mysterious Orson (Bates Wilder) for help, he sends her to a mysterious cave in the woods. But the child Marie brings back from the forest may not be the son she lost.

A genre-bending film that’s full of the sort of twists even seasoned moviegoers will likely not see coming, that explores the all-too-human pain of love and loss through a filter that’s covered with no small amount of blood. – LB

Kill Me

At first glance, Kill Me seems to ask the question, “What if Charlie Kelly woke up in a bathtub of his own blood?” But with a deeply emotional and revelatory performance from Charlie Day, the horror-dramedy becomes so much more. Sure, our main character, Jimmy, lives in a dingy apartment a la Charlie and Frank, and his frenetic energy while trying to solve his own murder attempt harkens back to a Pepe Silvia obsession… but that’s not a bad thing. The audience is immediately comforted by the familiarity of Day’s impeccable comedic timing right before adjusting to the sobering reality that his character has a history of trying to take his own life—making him the perfect choice to carry the emotional weight of this film. 

Jimmy meets his match in Allison Williams’ 911 operator, Margot. She grounds both him and a film that turns into an unlikely whodunit. Williams has also become something of a scream queen over the last decade (starring in Get Out, M3GAN, The Perfection), but pure horror this film is not. Similarly to Day, she brings the authenticity and depth needed to be Jimmy’s “straight man” as she navigates the hijinks of solving a maybe-murder while healing from her own trauma. 

It’s a feat to address subject matter as serious as suicide while ensuring the audience knows they’re allowed to laugh—and a lot for that matter. Director Peter Warren tactfully displays both ends of the spectrum that people with mental illness can experience: the dramatics of suicide attempts but also the mundanity of ordering the same meal every day for months. In his own words, “Depression and mental illness are incredibly dangerous but can also be dumb and annoying. It’s like stepping on a rake a million times in your head.” – Britt Migs

Lainey Wilson: Keepin’ Country Cool

Amy Scott is the director behind Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately? and Sheryl, proving an affinity for documentary storytelling about some of the music industry’s most iconic names. Now, she is bringing the story of modern country idol Lainey Wilson to Netflix.

Lainey Wilson: Keepin’ Country Cool is set to premiere globally on April 22. It follows the country star on her ascent to major stardom while traveling the country on the “Country’s Cool Again Tour” in 2024. 

“After a while, it was apparent that we weren’t chasing the tour, we were chasing Lainey,” Scott says. “Her life is all over the place. Her life is not a straight line, so we just tried to hold onto that mechanical bull ride.” 

While being jostled around the country and holding on for dear life, Scott and her team discovered the heart of Wilson’s music and her musical persona. Not only are her powerful vocals and charisma emblematic of industry titans like Dolly Parton, but her compassion and grit are what give her music, and this documentary, their spirit. 

“Vulnerablilty can come in many different flavors,” Scott says. “It can be vulnerability about struggles, but vulnerability also is when you can be funny and have a really unguarded, self-deprecating nature, and we realized early on that (Lainey) is really, really funny.”

Throughout the documentary, Wilson is seen constantly songwriting when she isn’t rehearsing or performing. She has spent her career banking songs for upcoming records, using her determination and open heart as fodder for the future of her skyrocketing career; Scott’s latest project delivers all of these details in a way that is careful, exciting, and, of course, incredibly cool. – SR

Leviticus

The land down under has long been a reliable source of uniquely upsetting films, from Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) to Lake Mungo (2008), but Australian horror has enjoyed a renaissance as of late, thanks to hits such as The Babadook (2014) and Talk to Me (2022). 

Director Adrian Chiarella continues that tradition with his debut, Leviticus, which stars Joe Bird of Talk to Me and Stacy Clausen as two gay teens forced to participate in a conversion ritual by a fundamentalist pastor. The ritual releases a malevolent entity that takes the form of the person the victim most desires, which, for the boys, is one another.

“When I started thinking about things that were personal to me as a gay man, I knew that homophobia was something that I wanted to tackle in a film,” Chiarella tells Den of Geek. “There’s a clue in the word: homophobia is a fear. So I started digging deeper into what that might look like through the lens of this genre.”

The stars of Leviticus followed Chiarella’s lead by playing the reality of their characters’ plight. “I think that horror films are, in a way, dramas with horror elements because the emotions are so real and raw,” observes Bird. “It’s not like I was filming a horror film in one scene and a romance film in others. These were just real, natural people going through this experience.”

Chiarella adds, “I knew the horror element wouldn’t work unless you were really invested in the connection between these two lead characters.” To that end, he sent Bird and Clausen out on various field trips to build their characters. Those trips included visits to the country because, like any other good piece of Australian horror, the terror in Leviticus comes from the landscape. – JG

Mam

Part of the appeal of film festivals like SXSW is the chance for audiences to take in both mid-budget blockbusters bound for big theaters and the indie-est indies that ever indie-d. Projects like Over Your Dead Body and I Love Boosters occupy the former space on 2026’s SXSW roster. Mam is very much part of the latter. 

Directed by Nan Feix, Mam is an unabashed love letter to Vietnamese cuisine, New York’s Chinatown, and love itself. It’s also a novel blend of fictional narrative and documentary. While Mam is fully scripted, it recounts the real life story of chef Jerald Head as he moves to New York from Texas and tries to make it in the culinary world. Playing Head and his wife and business partner Nhung Dao Head are Head and Nhung themselves, who now own and operate Mắm on Forsyth Street. 

Shot in a scant 16 days (usually after a shift at the restaurant, Head revealed in a post-screen Q&A), Mam wears its lowkey indie status on its sleeve. The rough-around-the-edge film is unlikely to have a second life outside of Austin. But for 81 pleasant minutes, it made festival-goers in Alamo Drafthouse’s auditorium 5 very, very hungry. – AB

Manhood

What is likely to earn points as the most unusual and eyebrow-raising documentary at this year’s festival (or perhaps almost any other) is Daniel Lombroso’s Manhood, a sober look at the growing popularity of “male enhancement” cosmetic procedures (read: penis enlargement). It’s a subject ripe for ridicule or late night comedy, and yet the film takes a clinical lens that flits between aloof and sympathetic, depending on the interviewee. All are part of a larger line, though, of dudes willing to sell their house or risk their mortgages to increase their girth.

Astutely setting the film primarily in the Dallas and Miami areas of the South, Lombroso pulls at a thread from a previous documentary—his depressingly prescient study of the then fringe elements of the alt-right in the Atlantic’s White Noise (2020)—to draw a link between the manosphere culture of supplemental pills and Joe Rogan-like podcasts, and a lot of the guys desperate to add a few inches at any cost. Yet there’s perhaps a bit more empathy for the younger and more vulnerable parties who get taken for a ride and permanently disfigured by grifters with white coats and needles stuffed with filler.

The film could draw a stronger link in its thesis between the modern culture that its title obviously evokes and the guys on the table, but it finds both pathos and condemnation to varying degrees for alleged “medical” predators, and the type of souls who end up thinking they need to have this procedure done. One wishes to spend more time with the partners who often shrug they don’t even care. – DC

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice

Writer-director BenDavid Grabinski might have been too young to make movies in the ‘90s, but he was definitely watching them. And nowadays he appears to be determined to bring a flavor of them back, complete with a hard-swaggering, high-concept genre exercise starring Vince Vaughn at his most confident. A movie about gangsters, parties, and time travel, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is a bit like if Swingers, Go, and Back to the Future had a half-forgotten love child who we’re now only meeting as an adult. And that’s meant as a compliment.

As the title suggests, this is a love triangle served in four parts after gangster Nick (Vaughn) time travels about half a year into the past in order to stop his slightly younger self (also Vaughn) from murdering their best friend Mike (James Marsden) for the affair he’s carrying on with Nick’s unhappy wife, Alice (Eiza González). It’s a gonzo premise that is treated with just enough seriousness to give meat to the idea of considering second chances—whether through the magic of a proverbial “undo” button,  or where you’d even want to hit it to fix a bad mistake. As González notes in our studio, “I always connect with moving forward. I think there’s something beautiful about the chaos. Some of the craziest, most beautiful things that happened in my life have come from real terrible circumstances and bad moments”

Still, in its heart, this movie is all about the vibes, as indicated by its structure being based around the “PARTY,” “AFTERPARTY,” and “AFTER-AFTER-AFTERPARTY” which its main quartet crashes while trading barbs in a screenplay with more wisecracks than there are bullets. And trust us, this movie has a whole lotta bullets. It’s bravado and muscular mischief and suggests Grabinski is one to watch. – DC

My Brother’s Killer

This documentary solves a murder case gone cold. My Brother’s Killer, directed by Rachel Mason, traces the 36 years since the brutal murder of 25-year-old William “Billy London” Arnold Newton in West Hollywood. 

This film captures the violence, trauma, and grief gay men experienced during the AIDS epidemic, as well as their resilience. Through archival material and dozens of interviews with those connected to the case, including her own mother, Mason uncovers shocking information.

“It was a terribly violent time and I think that’s another undocumented part of gay history,” Mason says. “Sadly, it is hard to always focus on the negativity and sadness, and the resilience of gay culture is the most amazing thing. In the sea of death, you also have this vibrancy, and I really wanted to showcase that. It doesn’t always have to be dark, the fight can be joyful in a strange way.”

Billy was an adult filmmaker, poet, and illustrative artist—he was also deeply loved by the people around him, a feeling evident throughout the documentary. This documentary is more than a true crime film, it showcases the struggle of representation and provides recognition and closure for those involved. – AH

Normal

Full disclosure: We were not able to actually see director Ben Wheatley and screenwriter Derek Kolstad’s new action movie starring Bob Odenkirk—the deceptively titled Normal—in Austin. However, we were able to speak with all three men, who have described the movie as a kind of inversion of High Noon. In that classic Western, Gary Cooper stood alone as a sheriff willing to face up bad men while all the people who loved him turned their backs in fear.

“It’s ultimately taking those themes, the sense and the appeal, and wrapping it around small-town Americana,” Kolstad observes about their new film. But it’s also doing so in a modern context with the America of today, setting the stage for an action spectacle apropos of the scribe behind John Wick.

For his part, director Wheatley appreciates that he has brought a British sensibility to the proceedings, saying, “An outsider’s perspective is always interesting. Not to say it’s better than worse from any other point-of-view, but I think there’s a long history of people coming from the outside to film the States and to see it with different eyes.” It also might be befitting of the neo-Western. While genre icon John Wayne famously detested High Noon back in the day, refusing to believe a small town wouldn’t support a good man in need, Normal’s viewers might be much more open to the idea. As Odenkirk quips, “He should meet some small towns.”

Over Your Dead Body

When it comes to filmmaking, the concept of “escalation” can be just as important as acting, scripting, or even turning the damn cameras on in the first place. Few movies at the 2026 SXSW Film Festival understand the importance of raising the stakes better than action comedy thriller Over Your Dead Body. 

Based on the 2021 Norwegian film The Trip and directed by The Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone, all Over Your Dead Body knows how to do is escalate. Things start relatively simple with husband and wife Dan and Lisa (Shrinking’s Jason Segel and Ready or Not’s Samara Weaving) repairing to a remote cabin upstate to save their dying marriage… and also to kill each other. Dan and Lisa’s murderous plans are complicated by a cascade of interlopers and extenuating circumstances, leading to mass amounts of blood, gore, and perhaps even some rekindled romance. 

Over Your Dead Body’s commitment to ratcheting absurdity means that its first act runs a bit dry. But once two prison escapees (Timothy Olyphant, Keith Jardine) and their guard conspirator (Juliette Lewis) enter the narrative, the movie really gets rolling and never looks back. And like any good partnership, Segel and Weaving excel in dabbling in the other’s home turf of horror and comedy, respectively. 

“I’m just so proud to have made a remake that I feel like has teeth,” Taccone says. “It’s dark, it’s fucked up, and it’s more gory than the original, weirdly. It has its own tone, and I just feel very proud that we could make something that I like equally to the original.” – AB

Pizza Movie

In a shameless throwback to the stoner comedies of the 2000s, Pizza Movie is the type of slouched and underachieving good time that is destined to best be seen in a crowded theater or even rowdier dorm room. Which isn’t to say it’s dumb. Writers-directors Nick Kocher and Brian McEllhaney take some boldly clever swings in their high-concept (ahem) where a couple of college screw-ups (Stranger Things’ Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone) indulge in an experimental drug they find in their dorm room. However, the thing has such potent magical properties, it not only gets them high but causes them to break the space-time continuum with time-loops and fourth-wall breaks. They’re like a pair of blitzed Punxsutawney co-eds.

The only cure? Pizza, of course, which is down in the lobby if they can get down there in time—or face severe consequences. It’s a deliberately, heavily-baked concept, which Kocher describes as based on a true story. “In college, we had the idea. Everyone’s ordered food when they’re not fully sober and it’s difficult.” You can say that again, dude. – DC

Power Ballad

It is said that success is the child of many fathers while failure is an orphan. But that doesn’t mean every papa gets the credit they deserve, particularly in fields as competitive (and lucrative) as songwriting. Such is the appealing conceit of John Carney’s latest bittersweet laugher that looks into the music business with as much affection as there is contempt. They, in fact, walk hand-in-hand when Paul Rudd’s washed up wedding singer Rick meets Nick Jonas’ former boy band heartthrob searching for reinvention, Danny. The two jam and jive during a joyous night over drinks in Ireland, including when Rick shows a few of the pieces he’s working on, particularly a poignant ballad that’s only missing a bridge.

Six months later, the song has it, as does Danny who’s introduced it to the world as an instant sensation—and as a piece of musical magic he wrote solo. A bit of a music industry “Book of Job,” where Rudd’s hurt and aggrieved Rick must deal with the eye-rolls and second-guessing of nearly everyone in his life, from his bandmates to even his wife and daughter. There’s a lot of humor in the scenario, but plenty of pathos as Rudd gives one of the finest performances of his career. He’s a man losing his sanity and his even-keel, to the point where he must travel from the Emerald Isle to the City of Angels. – DC

Pretty Lethal

The loftiness of chasing perfection, and the physical demand of what many consider the highest performing art, has always made ballet a compelling subject for filmmakers. Storytellers often wish to track the psychic or physiological toll of achieving révérence—or at least contrasting it with gonzo, blood-splattered spectacle. Pretty Lethal attempts both in a daffy B-crowdpleaser that essentially Die Hards five prima ballerinas when they’re trapped in an eastern European den of iniquity run by a vamping Uma Thurman. 

The movie gets a lot of mileage out of its balletic heroines being decidedly not John McClane (or Ana de Armas in a John Wick movie, for that matter). Instead, they nervously use their on pointe routine to “Waltz of the Flowers” for a blood-soaked defense in a bar involving knives, shattered wine bottles, and knives in the slippers. Says star Maddie Ziegler, “We sort of came up with a style we’re calling ballet-fu, which was really fun. Because we referenced if you put a bunch of feral cats in a box, that was what we were doing to survive. But I think we used our strengths to our advantage,” complete by combining the input of stunt coordinators and ballet choreographers. Grace is harmony. – DC

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

In an age of so-called “elevated” and sober-minded horror cinema, it is a blessing from Mr. Le Bail that we have Radio Silence ready to turn up the gore and fun. The filmmaking collective behind Ready or Not, Abigail, and the best Scream movies made in this century return to their own blood-red haunts and splash new buckets of crimson in the delightfully sinister Ready or Not 2. Like its predecessor, this is a grinning romp suffused with eat-the-rich gallows humor as we revisit the Bride in the splattered dress (Samara Weaving) mere moments after she parted brutally with her groom for good. (He was in the process of trying to sacrifice her to Satan. As apparently one does in country estates.)

Unfortunately for Grace, there are plenty of other Devil-worshipping billionaires out there. It turns out to be a blessing for the audience, though, as she inevitably slaughters them alongside sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) during a new hide-and-seek game at a country club that looks suspiciously like Mar-a-Lago. As director Gillett acknowledges, “All of the institutions that we engage with, if you follow them fall enough, you’re probably going to find some form of corruption.”

The movie doesn’t quite reach the same highs as the first movie since we know the punchline this time, but the climax at an elite Satanic altar is every bit as giddy as the combustible billionaires last time, and Samara Weaving still knows how to deliver a killing parting shot. – DC

The Saviors

Filmmakers don’t get to choose whether their films will be “timely” or not. Movies take a long time to make and time itself, as you might have noticed, has a tendency to Inexorably March On. Rarely has there ever been a better case study of that phenomenon than the unusually (and completely accidentally) timely comedy thriller The Saviors. 

Adam Scott and Danielle Deadwyler star as Sean and Kim, a couple in a failing marriage who look to supplement their income by renting their shed to Amir and Jahan – a brother and sister from an undisclosed Middle Eastern nation played by Theo Rossi and Nazanin Boniadi. While Amir and Jahan seem nice, they’re also suspiciously interested in the president of the United States’ whereabouts and appear to be building some sort of dangerous device. But this can’t be what Sean and Kim think it is, right? They’re not bigots and this isn’t a mediocre season of 24… right?

Due to a confluence of events like a pandemic, two Hollywood work stoppages, and the general improbability of getting a movie produced at all, The Saviors took 10 years to make from conception to premiere. And in that 10 years, the world shifted away from Obama-era progressive optimism to a more overt return to Islamophobia with the United States even entering war with Iran just two weeks before the film’s premiere.  

“You know, there was a period in those 10 years when I thought the world had changed a bit, and maybe we should focus on a different project,” director and co-writer Kevin Hamedani says. “And then the world changed again, and suddenly The Saviors is even more timely, unfortunately.”

The Saviors’ incidental resonance to current events only enhances what is already a compelling narrative. Scott and Deadwyler shine as two ostensibly progressive individuals who need answers but don’t want to seem like Bradley Whitford’s “I’d have voted for Obama a third time if I could” character in Get Out. Hamedani and the script deftly guide the audience through those choppy waters, always leaving enough breadcrumbs so that the viewer doesn’t fully feel like Bradley Whitford either. The end result is a nifty little thriller that feels like The ‘Burbs for the Airbnb age. – AB

Seekers of Infinite Love

Though Seekers of Infinite Love may one day be a cult comedy, right now it’s literally a comedy about a cult… but also about family

Hannah Einbinder (Hacks), John Reynolds (Search Party), and Griffin Gluck (American Vandal) star as a trio of siblings who must rescue their sister from the clutches of the Peoples Temple-esque the Seekers of Infinite Love. Helping them on their mission is ex cult member-turned-cult deprogrammer Rick (Justin Theroux) and his wardrobe of tactical vests. 

According to writer/director Victoria Strouse, Seekers’ cult angle emerged unexpectedly late in the writing process of the script, which was featured on 2008’s Black List.

“I’m utterly fascinated by siblings and I think some of the complexities in sibling relationships, [it] kind of ends up talking so much about all human relationships,” she says. “As I was working on it, I became really interested in cults, this idea of a secondary but corrupt family.”

That fascination with family shines through with Einbinder, Reynolds, and Gluck evoking a believably agitated sibling unit, if not a believably genetic one with their diverse mix of heights and hair colors. While the end result could have used a little more cult whackiness to fully live up to its comedic potential, it’s hard to be disappointed with time spent on a road trip to oblivion with four very funny actors. – AB 

See You When I See You

Before 2025’s SXSW title The Baltimorons, indie filmmaking titan Jay Duplass had not directed a movie since 2012’s The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, opting to help shepherd other storytellers’ visions alongside his brother and producing partner Mark Duplass. But when fellow producing family Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon brought the script for See You When I See You his way, he knew he had to get behind the camera once again. “It just felt big and scary and like I couldn’t say no,” he says. 

It’s easy to see why the project appealed to Duplass. Written by comedian Adam Cayton-Holland, and based on his memoir Tragedy Plus Time, See You When I See You is an intensely personal story about Cayton-Holland’s PTSD following the death of his sister by suicide. Cooper Raiff (director and star of Cha Cha Real Smooth) steps in as the film’s Cayton-Holland analogue, Aaron, and does marvelous work unpacking the young man’s confused journey through grief.

Outside of some creative visual choices representing Aaron’s struggle to reclaim happy memories of his sister, See You When I See You doesn’t have much new to say about the grieving process. Ultimately though, that’s a feature, not a bug, as the rhythms of pain should resonate with anyone who has experienced real tragedy. Even if those experiences involve significantly less Third-Eye Blind and Sum 41 than Aaron’s. – AB

Sender

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever been sent in the mail? The answer to that question can range from the mundane—a gardening hat you didn’t order—to the truly bizarre. Actor David Dastmalchian, for one, tells us he was mailed dirty underwear more than once by an anonymous…. fan? “It was accompanied by a really bizarre letter,” the actor grimaces.

That’s obviously immediately creepy, yet writer-director Russell Goldman’s Sender takes an initially more innocuous stance before turning the screws. And according to Goldman, this too is based on real-life. “[Folks will] send you cheap objects that are related, most likely, to your search history online and any cookies or data can take from what you’re looking like. They send it to your home so they can write reviews in your name that are five stars, so those products can then get a boost on the algorithms.”

Sender takes that conceit to its most ominous, Hitchockian extreme when Britt Lower’s Julia receives a mysterious package from an even more mysterious, and threatening, source. – DC

Sinner Supper Club

Described as a “gay mumblecore ghost story” directors of Sinner Supper Club, Daisy Rosato and Nora Kaye, deliver exactly what is promised. Shot on an iPhone within six days and rooted in improvisation, the film is a scrappy documentation of a NYC-based friend group on the fritz during a heat wave. 

Gathered in a small apartment for Genevieve’s (Genevieve Simon) “eviction funeral,” tensions arise amidst the group over things big and small. On top of navigating their shared-traumatic experience, the death of a best friend, nothing seems to go right — a melted ice cream cake, the power going out, and worst of all, an uninvited partner is brought to the gathering. The night culminates in an unexpected, yet restorative, paranormal experience. 

Sinner Supper Club explores the surrealness of grief from an intrinsically queer perspective. It delivers comedic beats and moments of grief with the fluidity of a high-budget film. While there are moments of hesitance from the actors, the ensemble cast delivers a performance where you feel dropped in the middle of their hangout. – AH

They Will Kill You

The idea for They Will Kill You blossomed after director Kirill Sokolov stayed in an eerie hotel that he believed to be inhabited by a cult of old women. The fictionalized and much gorier version stars Zazie Beetz as the new housekeeper at a decadent hotel with a history of mysterious disappearances. As Sokolov brings her violent journey through the mysterious building to the big screen, the company explores countless genres, from mystery to slapstick to fantasy. 

“Kirill was always reminding us that yes, there’s action, and yes, there’s comedy, but also, at least for me, the most important thing was the truth at the moment,” Myha’la, who plays Beetz’s sister, says. “Then, if it feels truthful and honest and real to me and us in this moment, the comedy is going to come in the edit.” 

The highlight of the movie is the performances from actors like Patricia Arquette, Tom Felton, Heather Graham, and the aforementioned sister duo. They expertly balance multiple styles and tropes, giving the movie an edge in an arguably oversaturated genre.  

“It is genre-defying because it is a love story about two sisters, and that’s really at the core of everything, and then you mix in the brilliant Kung Fu and gore and martial arts and heroism,” Felton says. “It’s a unique blend. I don’t think a film has ever been made quite like this.” – SR 

Time and Water

“The future we were warned about is no longer distant, it is here.” This is the message that Oscar-nominated director Sara Dosa shares in her newest documentary Time and Water. Through archival material and the writings of Icelandic author, Andri Snær Magnason, Dosa puts together an expansive story focused on generational memory and humanity’s relationship with nature. 

Centered on Magnason’s own family ties, Time and Water captures the vast existence of Icelandic glaciers and the tremendous loss felt by the author as he witnesses the disappearance of these titans, and the passing of his grandparents. The audience is transported through the passing of time and experiences the indelible impression humans make on the world and people around them.  

“There is something radical about love, especially in a time that is so polarizing,” Dosa says. “Wherever we can center love and joy amid the doom and the apocalyptic stories abound, I think it could inspire hope…I think it can give a sense of a light in the dark to keep people working toward the change that we so badly need.” 

Time and Water is a stark wake-up call, not only to protect the planet we call home, but to cherish our time with loved ones. The future is now, and Dosa captures the course we took to get here. – AH

Wishful Thinking

It sometimes feels impossible to be happy—even with someone you love—when there’s so much bad news in the world. So imagine the pressure Julia and Charlie (Maya Hawke and Lewis Pullman) are under in Wishful Thinking, a supremely clever and wholesome romantic comedy where the fate of Portland, Oregon, if not the world, rests on the straining romance of two young people at a crossroads in their life. As it slowly dawns on them, when things are good in their domestic life, Julia is suddenly up for a promotion at work, and Charlie’s crypto investments are skyrocketing. When they’re unhappy with each other, literal earthquakes can occur.

It’s a shrewd use of magical realism to entertain wish fulfillment—like literally getting rich off crypto after a particularly sexy date night—but also comment on the pressures we put on each other in the modern world, particularly for those who are as socially entangled and plugged in as the film’s Gen-Z antiheroes. It’s an indie rom-com about the challenge of early adult romances, complete with a big swing ending. But it finds an innovative way to engage these elements, especially when Hawke and Pullman are simpatico—and perhaps even more so when they’re not. – DC

Woodstockers

We were delighted to welcome film and TV mainstay Corbin Bernsen back to the Den of Geek Studio at SXSW to chat about his indie TV pilot, Woodstockers. This time, Bernsen–who is the showrunner, writer, and star– was joined by his son, Oliver, who directed the pilot episode (he also had a feature-length directorial debut, Bagworm, play at the festival).

The delightfully funny dramedy puts the audience in the headspace of an aging hippie confronting life, death, and a bygone era and its legacy set against scenic upstate New York. Our conversation was introspective as the Bernsen’s grappled with deep conversations on set, Corbin’s own career journey, which launched during that period in 1967, and their excitement for independent filmmaking in the television space. Their commitment to the form paid off: Woodstockers took home an Audience award. Now that’s Flower Power. – Chris Longo

Television

Are We Still Married?

Indie TV pilot Are We Still Married? stars Dustin Milligan as Jack, a husband who has been turned into a vampire via a bite from a mysterious bat, and Taylor Misiak as Laura, his wife who isn’t sure whether we should let him back in the house. While that is undoubtedly a bold genre concept, the inspiration for the story came from a real life experience for writer/director Kit Steinkellner (who also created the Facebook Watch series Sorry For Your Loss).

“My husband did get bit by a bat,” she tells Den of Geek. “It was that kind of crazy thing that doesn’t happen except when it does. He got a rabies shot and was OK. I don’t know how you process trauma in your marriage but comedic bits are our go-to. So we just started cracking vampire jokes. At a certain point, he was like ‘but if I were a vampire, you would let me back in the house, right?’ I paused and he didn’t like that pause.”

Through the safety of her closed kitchen window, Laura peppers Jack with questions about vampirism that he doesn’t have the answers to (the bat didn’t exactly explain all the rules of this whole thing). Steinkellner and the actors make beautiful work of the premise, both having fun with the genre silliness of it all while also delving into the pathos of a loving marriage interrupted by a truly unforeseeable calamity. Coming in at just 15 minutes long, Are We Still Married? serves as a compelling proof of concept for whatever direction, and medium, Steinkellner wants to take the story from here.

“I did write a feature inspired by this that was on this past year’s Blacklist. At the same time, in having this conversation with South by, a part of the independent pilot requirement is to submit a series bible. I’ve actually not done this with other ideas before but I have pretty thoroughly explored both options. Ultimately I just want to keep telling this story.” – AB

The Audacity

Have you ever wondered where the wunderkind techbros of Silicon Valley get the audacity? Thankfully so has Jonathan Glatzer, a former writer on Succession and Better Call Saul and now the creator and showrunner of AMC’s fittingly named The Audacity. 

“For years, I thought of audacity as a kind of superpower that we all have, but few of us actually employ because it involves crashing through norms of behavior. Most of us are not bulls in China shops, but in Silicon Valley, it is kind of regarded as an attribute. There’s a lot of broken dishes around there, but that’s what they like: move fast and break things,” he says.

Through its first three episodes, The Audacity doesn’t move fast, but it does break some things. Billy Magnussen (a compelling character actor probably best known for Game Night and Made For Love) steps into the megalomaniacal shoes of Hypergnosis CEO Duncan Park. Eager to prove that he’s much more than the product of some well-timed good luck, Duncan leverages his relationship with his therapist Joanne Felder to gain some (flagrantly illegal) advantages over his competition. 

The Audacity excels as a slice of life look at the excesses (and yes, audacity) of Silicon Valley’s elite in the rapidly expanding AI era. While its early episodes come off as more of a vibe in search of a story, the level of talent both behind and in front of the camera suggests that it has plenty of room to grow. – AB

The Comeback Season 3

Since The Comeback first premiered in 2005, Valerie Cherish has always returned to TV when it needs her the most. The first season of the HBO comedy found the aging sitcom diva played by Lisa Kudrow trying to navigate the brave new world of reality TV, recording her comeback as Aunt Sassy on new sitcom “Room and Bored.” In 2014’s season 2, Valerie attempted to get in on the Bravo-fication of the medium by pitching a pilot to Andy Cohen. Now, with The Comeback’s third and final season, Valerie is set to tackle television’s gravest challenge yet: artificial intelligence.

“[The Comeback] began with what everyone thought was the first extinction event [of TV], which was reality TV, eliminating scripted television for the more economical – no rules, no unions,” Kudrow says. “Happily that wasn’t the end. [Co-creator Michael Patrick King and I] were having lunch and he was like ‘What about this: Valerie is finally offered the lead in a multi-camera sitcom but it’s written about AI.’”

The Comeback season 3’s eight episodes present yet another comedic masterclass of industry satire and character-building. There’s never been someone quite like Valerie Cherish on television and there is unlikely to be ever again. The fading superstar is desperate for fame yet uniquely ill-equipped to handle it, spending much of her adult life flourishing in front of sitcom studio multicams while putting her foot in her mouth in front of documentary single cams. 

The Comeback’s satire is so subtle as to be barely visible. Really it’s the story of a singular character who refuses to let her story end regardless of how many times the industry tries to close the book… and all the humiliation she endures with a grin because of it. Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King give Valerie Cherish the ending she so richly deserves, but we’ll miss her all the same. – AB

The Dark Wizard

The history of rock climbing is rife with larger-than-life characters and adventure sport trailblazers, but few loom as large as Dean Potter. A climber, high-liner, BASE jumper and all around Yosemite Valley Renaissance man, Potter set speed records and free soloed daunting walls at an unprecedented caliber for the duration of his career. Now, Peter Mortimer and Nick Rosen – documentary filmmakers and Potter’s old friends – are bringing his story to HBO Max with their new docuseries, “The Dark Wizard.” 

“His aura and myth dominated the sport, both because he was pioneering all these crazy things … but there was also a much broader story there, the behind the scenes and what was going on in his personal world that was really compelling that no one had really heard about,” Rosen says. 

“The Dark Wizard” not only details Potter’s Herculean feats and the impact he had on the climbing community, but also his mental health journey that took place behind the closed doors of an alpha facade. 

“It’s unbelievable seeing all these Olympic athletes talk about their mental health and the struggles,” Mortimer says. “That just was not happening back in the time.” 

The only documentation of Potter’s internal dialogues were in his journals, which his sister donated to the filmmaking duo so they could platform the realities of his life. Using stylistic images and animations from these diaries, alongside interviews with Potter and his inner circle, Mortimer and Rosen crafted a chilling recapitulation of the climber’s life. – SR 

Margo’s Got Money Troubles

Margo’s got money troubles, sure. But she’s also got some big expectations to meet. The Apple TV dramedy entered the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival as the undisputed TV headliner, thanks to the involvement of two prestige studios (A24 and the aforementioned Apple TV), a legendary TV showrunner (David E. Kelley), and a high-powered cast that would fit right in at this year’s Oscars ceremony (Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman, Nicole Kidman, and more). Still, it’s one thing to have a lot of expensive toys; it’s another thing entirely to know how to play with them. Thankfully, Margo’s Got Money Troubles puts forward an eight-episode experience well worthy of its creative firepower. 

Based on a novel of the same name by Rufi Thorpe, Margo stars Elle Fanning as the titular young woman with money problems due to an unexpected pregnancy following a tryst with her douchey literature professor. Anticipating little help from her ex-Hooters waitress mother (Pfeiffer) or professional wrestler estranged father (Offerman), Margo gets creative (and sometimes nekkid) to pay the bills. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is Juno for the OnlyFans generation. It’s also the rare “prestige” episodic experience that doesn’t feel like a two-hour movie script that got out of hand. That’s all thanks to a preposterously charming lead performance from Fanning and her equally likable supporting cast. – AB

The post Everything We Saw at SXSW 2026: I Love Boosters, Wishful Thinking, The Comeback, and More appeared first on Den of Geek.

The following contains major spoilers for Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man For better (and sometimes worse), Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is a much more definitive ending to the decade-long saga of the Shelby clan than the final episode of the television series that preceded the film. A cinematic, often literally explosive conclusion featuring a […]

The post Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man Ending Explained: Who Lives, Who Dies, and What’s Next for the Shelby Family appeared first on Den of Geek.

The braintrusts that have presided over SXSW since nearly its inception have always smiled on the festival for its contrasts. It’s a fest where south meets west, and music meets film, meets technology, meets comedy, meets plain ol’ innovation. And in no other year has that felt more like a lived-in ethos than 2026, which saw everything happening everywhere and all at once (heh).

With the film, TV, music, activation, and cornucopia of other moments all occurring simultaneously in Austin, it was a whirlwind that can nearly overwhelm. Yet the Den of Geek team was there for almost all of it, covering what we can, and bringing it to you in this handy, dandy round-up.

Movies

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist

At the turn of the century, the world was excited by the prospect of new technology. The internet was a shiny toy, the dot com bubble hadn’t burst, and the iPod (never mind the iPhone) was still a glint in Steve Jobs’ eye. Filmmaker Daniel Kwan and technology ethicist Tristan Harris remember those days as a bit like a lost kingdom. After all, the world it has wrought has very little good cheer left in the public for new tech, especially with the AI revolution that is now commencing.

“With social media, we were not great stewards of that technology and how it rolled out,” Harris observes in the Den of Geek studio. “We created the most anxious and depressed generation of our lifetime, even though some of the people who were building it—the people who started Instagram, they were my dorm mates at Stanford—they didn’t intend for that to happen.” Which raises the question of why should folks have any confidence that many of the same companies and technology leaders will do better with the far more powerful prospect of artificial intelligence.

That conundrum is something which both men are confronting in the new Daniel Roher documentary, The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which Kwan is also a producer on. As the title suggests, the film examines both the most pessimistic and rosiest predictions for AI’s future, and everything in between. All possibilities are running rampant in Silicon Valley while billion-dollar companies dash madly toward being the first to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Yet the film also interrogates what tools can be put in place to create better stewards in the next generation. As Oscar-winner Kwan notes, “I think Big Tech has broken our social contract that we have as a society with technology. They have used our world as a playground to basically consolidate more power and more resources. The technology that they’re building—even though a lot of the architects and the technicians building this stuff, they have the greatest intentions and the greatest ideals of what this technology can do—the fact that it is being deployed within this current system, within this current incentive structure, it is taking a neutral technology and turning it into an extractive one.” – David Crow

Amazing Live Sea Monkeys

As the large, colorful gates open to Yolanda Signorelli’s Maryland estate, she’s without electricity, feeding woodland creatures tiny crackers – an unexpectedly intimate introduction to the woman at the center of The Amazing Live Sea Monkeys. Directed by Mark Becker and Aaron Schock, the documentary uses the nostalgia of comic books and the ‘60s to showcase an oddly complex legal saga and the history of the beloved “instant life” toy while uncovering lesser-known details about its creator, Harold von Braunhut. At its core is a David-and-Goliath-style battle between Signorelli, often called the “mother of Sea-Monkeys,” and Big Time Toys, which began licensing and distributing the product in 2007.

Through interviews with Signorelli, her lawyer, journalists, former collaborators, and illustrators behind the brand’s imagery, the film tells the story while keeping the people behind it at the center. Signorelli’s love for animals and the sea monkeys shine through all aspects of the film; Schock even told us that revealing the “sea monkey secret formula” was always a concern of Signorelli while filming. Throughout the documentary, Becker and Schock never shy away from examining von Braunhut’s various controversies in vivid detail. At the same time, the filmmakers didn’t want to lump Signorelli and her passion into the worst of what her former husband had done. It was complex, captivating, and perfectly fit for a SXSW premiere. – Darcie Zudell

American Dollhouse

John Valley doesn’t want to reinvent cinema with his movie, American Dollhouse. The story of a struggling woman named Sarah (Hailley Laurèn), who inherits her childhood home only to be beset by unstable neighbor Kelly (Kelsey Pribilski), follows in the tradition of horror greats, including Psycho, Peeping Tom, and Black Christmas. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have bigger things on its mind.

“I’m obsessed with how a slasher can be minimalist, but yet a container for huge, modern ideas,” Valley tells Den of Geek. “I stuck to the conventions and tropes, and kept telling the cast that it’s just a meat and potatoes slasher film, but we also tried to find some new, modern life in it.”

Part of that work fell on Pribilski, who had to embody an adult who has reverted to a childlike state in frightening ways. “I thought about how an eight-year-old acts. They’re a little bit animated because we as adults have learned to contain our emotions,” Pribilski reveals. “It was about knowing when to go bigger. We had to choose very carefully the moments for me to go into ‘grizzly bear’ mode, as John would call it.”

As Pribilski got to play big moments, it fell on her co-star Laurèn to keep things grounded in reality. “Sarah is a full person, and it was important to me that, when she makes a decision, it doesn’t come out of nowhere,” she says. That approach makes Sarah a formidable opponent, even for a killer as strange as Kelly. “Sarah’s a loyal fighter, for herself and the people she loves. She’s not going to just go down.”

Thanks to the work of Pribilski and Lauren, American Dollhouse adds a great new killer and final girl to the slasher tradition. – Joe George

Black Zombie

In a pop culture saturated with zombie shows like The Walking Dead and The Last of Us, many have forgotten the roots of Z-culture. Writer-director Maya Annik Bedward is not one of them. Right down to the title of Black Zombie conjuring the racist shadow of the nearly century-old Hollywood film White Zombie (1932), Bedward’s haunting documentary looks at more than a hundred years of appropriation, reinvention, and evolution of a concept that’s rooted in the vast sweep of African diaspora, and the Black Haitian experience of revolution in particular.

“In Haiti, everyone knows about the zombie, and in Haiti, stories of zombies and zombification are regularly talked about,” says Bedward. “It’s adjacent to vodou, but it’s not an everyday practice. Zombification is these stories of ‘I saw zombies in the field,’ and very connected to these ideas of enslavement.” These are the roots which inspired the white fiction that in turn gave the world their beloved modern flesh-easters. Black Zombie observes, critiques, and even at times celebrates this transition—within limits as the othered monster has increasingly become a symbol for tearing down sinister systems. Or just a fear of the status quo breaking… – DC

Brian 

Multiple castmates in Will Ropp’s directorial debut, Brian, were student body presidents in high school; a connection they didn’t make until SXSW. Ben Wang, who plays the titular character running for student body president to impress his crush, says he drew from his own awkward quirks when portraying the role. Edi Patterson and Randall Park play Wang’s parents, who care a little too much that their son finally made a friend. William H. Macy, who plays Brian’s therapist, talks Brian through his various panic attacks and struggles with mental health that cause him to lose roles in drama club, freak out his classmates, and annoy his friends. Meanwhile, his cool English teacher, portrayed by Natalie Morales, just wants to help Brian develop his party platform without indulging his inappropriate attraction to her. 

It’s a coming of age movie about mental health and the messy aspects of high school, but even more than that, the script by Mike Scollins is effortlessly funny in a way that will have you quoting Patterson’s and Park’s one-liners long after the first watch. Speaking of Patterson and Park, they got to have a lot of fun improvising during some dining room table scenes. Brian’s a good time, but one that will yank its audiences’ right back to high school in a visceral and emotional way.  – DZ 

Chasing Summer

Directed by Josephine Decker and written by leading lady, Iliza Shlesinger, Chasing Summer is a romantic comedy that is sexy, realistic, and overwhelmingly nostalgic. 

Jamie (Shlesinger) returns to her Texas hometown after a breakup, shocked to find that while the small hamlet may look the same, the people within it have changed. She picks up her old job at the roller rink, now owned by her sister (Cassidy Freeman), and meets Harper (Lola Tung), her young co-worker. Harper convinces Jamie to attend a party, where she meets a much younger Colby (Garrett Wareing). The two pursue a questionable fling while Jamie rekindles relationships with old high school classmates, including her ex-boyfriend, Chase (Tom Welling). The rest of the story is a sticky recreation of summer love that invokes the refreshing feeling of stepping into AC.

At times predictable, the film also has moments of shock, including a soap-opera-level reveal that will leave middle-aged women everywhere swooning. It is a retrospective on summers of days past, and the inevitability of moving on. It’s conventional, easy, and delivers the promise of a classic romcom. – Alexandra Hopkins

Crash Land 

What happens when a group of amateur stuntmen try to make a “real movie” so they can prove their worth to a town that hates them? Crash Land, directed by Dempsey Bryk, answers that very question. 

“It came out of COVID,” Bryk says. “I was stuck with my brother and my entire family… living behind the couches in the living room, as you do, and I was watching this Jackass marathon on loop and the idea blossomed out of there.” The film evokes classics of the genre – think Napoleon Dynamite, Superbad, and Bottle Rocket – against a Canadian backdrop of charming chaos. 

“There was a process of trying to make it not like anything else after being so inspired your entire life by the things you love, and then you have to try to find your own voice,” Bryk says. 

As Crash Land follows this group of boys becoming men one wipeout at a time, it simultaneously tells another coming of age story. The spirit behind Crash Land is the much more successful story of Dempsey Bryk and his brother Billy, who plays the emotional catalyst of the movie. Through his influence, the characters crash and land in a world that is fun, endearing, and unexpectedly touching. – Sophia Rooksberry 

Drag

Horror movies often tend to revolve around similar, oftentimes outlandish, concepts: A deranged killer, a disturbing monster, a haunted setting. But Drag, the debut feature film from Raviv Ullman and Greg Yagolnitzer, finds a scary story in an everyday, all-too-human problem. Yes, it’s a movie that’s really about the terrifying specter of lower back pain. 

The film stars Lizzy Caplan and Lucy DeVito as a pair of frequently-at-odds siblings who find themselves in increasing trouble during a house robbery gone wrong. When one of the pair throws their back out mid-heist, the other must help her escape by dragging her from the house’s upstairs bathroom down to the waiting car. Painfully uncomfortable (and often downright grisly) acts of body horror ensue, with plenty of gross-out details in full close-up even as they discover that the man they’ve come to rob is not everything he appears to be. – Lacy Baugher

Drift 

SXSW needs an Action Documentary screening section solely for Drift to exist in. Described by director Deon Taylor as a real life Catch Me If You Can, the documentary stars real-life action hero Isaac Wright as he recounts his career going to unprecedented heights for his art.

“The documentary is a lot more than just my artwork,” Wright says. “It has to do with my life and what I feel like my artwork really represents and a full portrait of what I think the goal of life is.” 

Under the artist name Drift, he climbs to the very top of the country’s tallest buildings capturing the most breathtaking and adrenaline-spiking photos, slowly working toward his dream of summiting the Empire State Building. 

“We went to the Instagram and these beautiful photos are just so captivating that it’s really overwhelming, and wondering why the hell he’s up there and what he’s doing was my initial reaction,” Roxanne Avent Taylor, the film’s producer, says. 

The documentary answers those questions in an exploration of the human spirit, as the occasional illegality of Drift’s climbs resulted in a multi-year battle with law enforcement across multiple states. 

“I believed that everyone could connect to the human story based on the fact that we’ve all been through something,” Taylor says. “We’ve all been misrepresented or someone has tried to tear down your character in some way.” 

On its surface, Drift is an action thriller come to life. At its core, Drift is a tear-jearking testament to a freedom that only the birds and the film’s namesake have experienced. – SR

Family Movie

When watching Family Movie, a chipper-oddball indie directed by Kevin Bacon and starring Kevin Bacon, as well as wife Kyra Sedgwick, daughter Sosie Bacon, and son Travis Bacon, one gets the sense that this is not what a real family flick with the Bacons would look like. At least you’d hope so! But given how mirthful this splatter-comedy is when their fictional doppelgängers are forced to deal with a murderer on the set of their horror movie-within-a-horror movie, you nonetheless feel like you’re sitting across from the gang during a lively game night.

“I think the movie definitely reflects on all our personalities individually and how we relate to each other,” Travis explains. “There’s definitely some little moments like that, but we’re still acting.”

Kevin later adds that screenwriter Dan Beers was able to collect some surprisingly accurate depictions of interpersonal dynamics after interviewing them each separately. Says the director: “When we got the first draft of the script, we were like, ‘Holy shit, how did you know that?!’ And it’s not like it’s pieces of dirt… it’s just ways of being.” – DC

Forbidden Fruits

A title like Forbidden Fruits suggests a heavy drama, thick with Biblical overtones and meditations on the nature of sin. Yet, one look at the new movie starring Lili Reinhart as the leader of a witch cult of mall girls promises the exact opposite, presenting itself as a spunky horror comedy.

However, according to director Meredith Alloway, religion weighs heavily on the story. “I love the idea that women are told that we’re quite literally the origin of evil and sin,” Alloway tells Den of Geek, a theme that goes all the way to the source material, the play “Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die” by Lily Houghton, who cowrote the screenplay with Alloway. 

Alloway continues, “When I read the play, I see all these women reclaiming that. Witchcraft and being in a coven are ways to make that narrative ours. I think when women get together and set an intention, whether it’s magic or literally just talking at a sleepover, that is really powerful.”

As Apple, Reinhart gathers a team of women to join her coven, including Lola Tung as Pumpkin, Victoria Pedretti as Cherry, and Alexandra Shipp as Fig,” all characters who are more than they initially appear. 

“No one’s playing a stereotype,” says Pedretti. “There are a lot of cues that might lead you to misjudge these women before you get to know them. Each character ends up surprising the audience with their humanity.”

“I think we all play very complex human individuals who just so happen to be born in a female body in this lifetime, who are trying to navigate the structures of our world,” adds Shipp.

In other words, the characters are richer and more complicated than one might think, just like Forbidden Fruits itself. – JG

The Fox 

Ever wanted to get in bed with a fox voiced by Olivia Colman? Well, Jai Courtney got to in Dario Russo’s The Fox, a magical realism comedy about what happens when people try to change themselves for their partners. Emily Browning reluctantly agrees to marry Courtney’s character, Nick, while secretly having an affair with her boss (Damon Herriman), who is also cheating on his wife (Claudia Doumit). In an effort to win their partner back, Nick listens to a fox he was moments away from killing in the woods, leading all the characters down a hole where they literally lose themselves. 

Russo directed, wrote, and scored The Fox, so naturally he had a very specific vision for the fantasy and comedy elements of the film. Russo says he finds it really annoying when characters in films deliver an over-exaggerated reaction to talking animals, so in this universe, talking foxes are the least out-of-the-ordinary thing. Though they didn’t really act alongside Colman, Doumit and Browning were obsessed with her narration; Browning says she listened to a recording of Colman’s voice acting over and over again on a run one time. The film is as ambitious as it is mystical, but it never loses its ability to make fun of the chaos and camp of it all. – DZ

He Bled Neon

With all its neon lights and gleeful indulgence of vice, Las Vegas has always made for a popular movie setting. Still, Vegas-native and He Bled Neon producer Nate Bolotin felt there was a certain kind of movie that Sin City had not yet played host to. 

“Twenty years ago, my step brother and best friend passed away. I got a text message from a mutual friend, just like how it happens in the movie actually, and had to go back and bury him and reconnect with the people that I had lost touch with. Someone came up to me at the funeral and said ‘hey, I think there’s some foul player here’ but we never went too deep. Fifteen years later or so it just clicked: we haven’t seen a Vegas revenge noir thriller in a world outside the Vegas strip.”

True to Bolotin’s real life experiences, He Bled Neon picks up with successful businessman Ethan (Joe Cole) receiving the fateful text and returning home to Las Vegas where he reconnects with his old crew (which includes characters played by Marshawn Lynch, Rita Ora, and Ismael Cruz Cordova) and begins to unpack the mystery of his brother Darren’s (Paul Wesley) death.

He Bled Neon aces the set-up, largely thanks to the colorful sensibilities of director Drew Kirsch and electronic soundscapes of composers Joe Trapanese and DJ Zhu. Once the revenge plot moves into the desert and grimy environs outside the strip, however, the film loses its distinctive sense of place and settles into a disappointingly conventional crime story. – Alec Bojalad

Hokum

Irish filmmaker Damian McCarthy became a SXSW Midnighter hero when 2024’s Oddity took home the festival’s Audience Award. Now he’s returned to Austin with some extra star power in tow. The horror auteur’s next spooky effort, Hokum, stars Severance’s Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman, an American novelist who absconds to a remote Irish inn to scatter his parents’ ashes and finish his latest book. Of course, it just so happens that this particular inn contains a honeymoon suite that is said to be haunted by an ancient witch…

Speaking of hauntings, Hokum’s first act is haunted by a weak characterization of Scott’s Ohm, whose lifetime of unaddressed grief has apparently manifested itself as a need to be a real dick. Once the movie gives way to the charismatic actor’s charm and McCarthy begins to flex his horror muscles, the back half blossoms into a pleasingly macabre experience. It’s also quite dark. Literally. 

“It’s dark in the film, and it was literally dark when we were in there making it,” Scott told Den of Geek. “It was pretty clear that this was going to be unsettling. As an actor, since your control is limited, you never know really how something is going to turn out at the end of the day. Having so much faith in Damian and seeing all the components they put together on set, I knew there was a chance that this could work.”  And indeed Hokum does work. – AB

I Love Boosters

Three projects into his burgeoning film career, it’s fair to say that Boots Riley has developed a house style. For a lesser creative, that level of one-note fixation might begin to grow stale. Thankfully, the marriage of the surreal with leftist politics is a note that this rapper, songwriter, and record-producer-turned-filmmaker knows how to play quite well. And he continues to do so in I Love Boosters.

Keke Palmer stars as Corvette, an aspiring fashion designer who ekes out a living as a “booster,” pinching high-end textiles and selling them to her neighborhood at a discount. Together with her friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), Corvette sets her booster sights on high-end fashion entrepreneur Christie Smith (Demi Moore) to close the fashion gap between the haves and have-nots.

Like Sorry to Bother You before it, I Love Boosters’ premise is merely a jumping off point for all the vivid imagery and offbeat twists to come. The movie that a ticket-buyer expects to see at minute 0 is very much not the movie they experience by minute 60 or so. Unlike Sorry to Bother You, however, Boosters’ absurdist twist isn’t a completely out-of-left-field human-animal hybrid situation but a far more mundane science fiction tool that we won’t spoil. Despite the relatively conventional sci-fi trappings of its back half, I Love Boosters feels satisfyingly anarchic and bizarre all the way through. – AB

Imposters 

The idea of changelings, body snatchers, or other false creatures that are somehow swapped into existing families without any of their members being the wiser is nightmare fuel from time immemorial. Imposters takes this idea and runs with it, crafting a story that wrestles with ideas of parenthood, commitment, and fear. 

The film stars Jessica Rothe and Charlie Barnett as Paul and Marie, a couple forced to contend with any parent’s worst nightmare when their baby mysteriously disappears. While everyone is convinced the resident Town Creep is responsible, Marie’s not so sure, and when she turns to the mysterious Orson (Bates Wilder) for help, he sends her to a mysterious cave in the woods. But the child Marie brings back from the forest may not be the son she lost.

A genre-bending film that’s full of the sort of twists even seasoned moviegoers will likely not see coming, that explores the all-too-human pain of love and loss through a filter that’s covered with no small amount of blood. – LB

Kill Me

At first glance, Kill Me seems to ask the question, “What if Charlie Kelly woke up in a bathtub of his own blood?” But with a deeply emotional and revelatory performance from Charlie Day, the horror-dramedy becomes so much more. Sure, our main character, Jimmy, lives in a dingy apartment a la Charlie and Frank, and his frenetic energy while trying to solve his own murder attempt harkens back to a Pepe Silvia obsession… but that’s not a bad thing. The audience is immediately comforted by the familiarity of Day’s impeccable comedic timing right before adjusting to the sobering reality that his character has a history of trying to take his own life—making him the perfect choice to carry the emotional weight of this film. 

Jimmy meets his match in Allison Williams’ 911 operator, Margot. She grounds both him and a film that turns into an unlikely whodunit. Williams has also become something of a scream queen over the last decade (starring in Get Out, M3GAN, The Perfection), but pure horror this film is not. Similarly to Day, she brings the authenticity and depth needed to be Jimmy’s “straight man” as she navigates the hijinks of solving a maybe-murder while healing from her own trauma. 

It’s a feat to address subject matter as serious as suicide while ensuring the audience knows they’re allowed to laugh—and a lot for that matter. Director Peter Warren tactfully displays both ends of the spectrum that people with mental illness can experience: the dramatics of suicide attempts but also the mundanity of ordering the same meal every day for months. In his own words, “Depression and mental illness are incredibly dangerous but can also be dumb and annoying. It’s like stepping on a rake a million times in your head.” – Britt Migs

Lainey Wilson: Keepin’ Country Cool

Amy Scott is the director behind Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately? and Sheryl, proving an affinity for documentary storytelling about some of the music industry’s most iconic names. Now, she is bringing the story of modern country idol Lainey Wilson to Netflix.

Lainey Wilson: Keepin’ Country Cool is set to premiere globally on April 22. It follows the country star on her ascent to major stardom while traveling the country on the “Country’s Cool Again Tour” in 2024. 

“After a while, it was apparent that we weren’t chasing the tour, we were chasing Lainey,” Scott says. “Her life is all over the place. Her life is not a straight line, so we just tried to hold onto that mechanical bull ride.” 

While being jostled around the country and holding on for dear life, Scott and her team discovered the heart of Wilson’s music and her musical persona. Not only are her powerful vocals and charisma emblematic of industry titans like Dolly Parton, but her compassion and grit are what give her music, and this documentary, their spirit. 

“Vulnerablilty can come in many different flavors,” Scott says. “It can be vulnerability about struggles, but vulnerability also is when you can be funny and have a really unguarded, self-deprecating nature, and we realized early on that (Lainey) is really, really funny.”

Throughout the documentary, Wilson is seen constantly songwriting when she isn’t rehearsing or performing. She has spent her career banking songs for upcoming records, using her determination and open heart as fodder for the future of her skyrocketing career; Scott’s latest project delivers all of these details in a way that is careful, exciting, and, of course, incredibly cool. – SR

Leviticus

The land down under has long been a reliable source of uniquely upsetting films, from Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) to Lake Mungo (2008), but Australian horror has enjoyed a renaissance as of late, thanks to hits such as The Babadook (2014) and Talk to Me (2022). 

Director Adrian Chiarella continues that tradition with his debut, Leviticus, which stars Joe Bird of Talk to Me and Stacy Clausen as two gay teens forced to participate in a conversion ritual by a fundamentalist pastor. The ritual releases a malevolent entity that takes the form of the person the victim most desires, which, for the boys, is one another.

“When I started thinking about things that were personal to me as a gay man, I knew that homophobia was something that I wanted to tackle in a film,” Chiarella tells Den of Geek. “There’s a clue in the word: homophobia is a fear. So I started digging deeper into what that might look like through the lens of this genre.”

The stars of Leviticus followed Chiarella’s lead by playing the reality of their characters’ plight. “I think that horror films are, in a way, dramas with horror elements because the emotions are so real and raw,” observes Bird. “It’s not like I was filming a horror film in one scene and a romance film in others. These were just real, natural people going through this experience.”

Chiarella adds, “I knew the horror element wouldn’t work unless you were really invested in the connection between these two lead characters.” To that end, he sent Bird and Clausen out on various field trips to build their characters. Those trips included visits to the country because, like any other good piece of Australian horror, the terror in Leviticus comes from the landscape. – JG

Mam

Part of the appeal of film festivals like SXSW is the chance for audiences to take in both mid-budget blockbusters bound for big theaters and the indie-est indies that ever indie-d. Projects like Over Your Dead Body and I Love Boosters occupy the former space on 2026’s SXSW roster. Mam is very much part of the latter. 

Directed by Nan Feix, Mam is an unabashed love letter to Vietnamese cuisine, New York’s Chinatown, and love itself. It’s also a novel blend of fictional narrative and documentary. While Mam is fully scripted, it recounts the real life story of chef Jerald Head as he moves to New York from Texas and tries to make it in the culinary world. Playing Head and his wife and business partner Nhung Dao Head are Head and Nhung themselves, who now own and operate Mắm on Forsyth Street. 

Shot in a scant 16 days (usually after a shift at the restaurant, Head revealed in a post-screen Q&A), Mam wears its lowkey indie status on its sleeve. The rough-around-the-edge film is unlikely to have a second life outside of Austin. But for 81 pleasant minutes, it made festival-goers in Alamo Drafthouse’s auditorium 5 very, very hungry. – AB

Manhood

What is likely to earn points as the most unusual and eyebrow-raising documentary at this year’s festival (or perhaps almost any other) is Daniel Lombroso’s Manhood, a sober look at the growing popularity of “male enhancement” cosmetic procedures (read: penis enlargement). It’s a subject ripe for ridicule or late night comedy, and yet the film takes a clinical lens that flits between aloof and sympathetic, depending on the interviewee. All are part of a larger line, though, of dudes willing to sell their house or risk their mortgages to increase their girth.

Astutely setting the film primarily in the Dallas and Miami areas of the South, Lombroso pulls at a thread from a previous documentary—his depressingly prescient study of the then fringe elements of the alt-right in the Atlantic’s White Noise (2020)—to draw a link between the manosphere culture of supplemental pills and Joe Rogan-like podcasts, and a lot of the guys desperate to add a few inches at any cost. Yet there’s perhaps a bit more empathy for the younger and more vulnerable parties who get taken for a ride and permanently disfigured by grifters with white coats and needles stuffed with filler.

The film could draw a stronger link in its thesis between the modern culture that its title obviously evokes and the guys on the table, but it finds both pathos and condemnation to varying degrees for alleged “medical” predators, and the type of souls who end up thinking they need to have this procedure done. One wishes to spend more time with the partners who often shrug they don’t even care. – DC

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice

Writer-director BenDavid Grabinski might have been too young to make movies in the ‘90s, but he was definitely watching them. And nowadays he appears to be determined to bring a flavor of them back, complete with a hard-swaggering, high-concept genre exercise starring Vince Vaughn at his most confident. A movie about gangsters, parties, and time travel, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is a bit like if Swingers, Go, and Back to the Future had a half-forgotten love child who we’re now only meeting as an adult. And that’s meant as a compliment.

As the title suggests, this is a love triangle served in four parts after gangster Nick (Vaughn) time travels about half a year into the past in order to stop his slightly younger self (also Vaughn) from murdering their best friend Mike (James Marsden) for the affair he’s carrying on with Nick’s unhappy wife, Alice (Eiza González). It’s a gonzo premise that is treated with just enough seriousness to give meat to the idea of considering second chances—whether through the magic of a proverbial “undo” button,  or where you’d even want to hit it to fix a bad mistake. As González notes in our studio, “I always connect with moving forward. I think there’s something beautiful about the chaos. Some of the craziest, most beautiful things that happened in my life have come from real terrible circumstances and bad moments”

Still, in its heart, this movie is all about the vibes, as indicated by its structure being based around the “PARTY,” “AFTERPARTY,” and “AFTER-AFTER-AFTERPARTY” which its main quartet crashes while trading barbs in a screenplay with more wisecracks than there are bullets. And trust us, this movie has a whole lotta bullets. It’s bravado and muscular mischief and suggests Grabinski is one to watch. – DC

My Brother’s Killer

This documentary solves a murder case gone cold. My Brother’s Killer, directed by Rachel Mason, traces the 36 years since the brutal murder of 25-year-old William “Billy London” Arnold Newton in West Hollywood. 

This film captures the violence, trauma, and grief gay men experienced during the AIDS epidemic, as well as their resilience. Through archival material and dozens of interviews with those connected to the case, including her own mother, Mason uncovers shocking information.

“It was a terribly violent time and I think that’s another undocumented part of gay history,” Mason says. “Sadly, it is hard to always focus on the negativity and sadness, and the resilience of gay culture is the most amazing thing. In the sea of death, you also have this vibrancy, and I really wanted to showcase that. It doesn’t always have to be dark, the fight can be joyful in a strange way.”

Billy was an adult filmmaker, poet, and illustrative artist—he was also deeply loved by the people around him, a feeling evident throughout the documentary. This documentary is more than a true crime film, it showcases the struggle of representation and provides recognition and closure for those involved. – AH

Normal

Full disclosure: We were not able to actually see director Ben Wheatley and screenwriter Derek Kolstad’s new action movie starring Bob Odenkirk—the deceptively titled Normal—in Austin. However, we were able to speak with all three men, who have described the movie as a kind of inversion of High Noon. In that classic Western, Gary Cooper stood alone as a sheriff willing to face up bad men while all the people who loved him turned their backs in fear.

“It’s ultimately taking those themes, the sense and the appeal, and wrapping it around small-town Americana,” Kolstad observes about their new film. But it’s also doing so in a modern context with the America of today, setting the stage for an action spectacle apropos of the scribe behind John Wick.

For his part, director Wheatley appreciates that he has brought a British sensibility to the proceedings, saying, “An outsider’s perspective is always interesting. Not to say it’s better than worse from any other point-of-view, but I think there’s a long history of people coming from the outside to film the States and to see it with different eyes.” It also might be befitting of the neo-Western. While genre icon John Wayne famously detested High Noon back in the day, refusing to believe a small town wouldn’t support a good man in need, Normal’s viewers might be much more open to the idea. As Odenkirk quips, “He should meet some small towns.”

Over Your Dead Body

When it comes to filmmaking, the concept of “escalation” can be just as important as acting, scripting, or even turning the damn cameras on in the first place. Few movies at the 2026 SXSW Film Festival understand the importance of raising the stakes better than action comedy thriller Over Your Dead Body. 

Based on the 2021 Norwegian film The Trip and directed by The Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone, all Over Your Dead Body knows how to do is escalate. Things start relatively simple with husband and wife Dan and Lisa (Shrinking’s Jason Segel and Ready or Not’s Samara Weaving) repairing to a remote cabin upstate to save their dying marriage… and also to kill each other. Dan and Lisa’s murderous plans are complicated by a cascade of interlopers and extenuating circumstances, leading to mass amounts of blood, gore, and perhaps even some rekindled romance. 

Over Your Dead Body’s commitment to ratcheting absurdity means that its first act runs a bit dry. But once two prison escapees (Timothy Olyphant, Keith Jardine) and their guard conspirator (Juliette Lewis) enter the narrative, the movie really gets rolling and never looks back. And like any good partnership, Segel and Weaving excel in dabbling in the other’s home turf of horror and comedy, respectively. 

“I’m just so proud to have made a remake that I feel like has teeth,” Taccone says. “It’s dark, it’s fucked up, and it’s more gory than the original, weirdly. It has its own tone, and I just feel very proud that we could make something that I like equally to the original.” – AB

Pizza Movie

In a shameless throwback to the stoner comedies of the 2000s, Pizza Movie is the type of slouched and underachieving good time that is destined to best be seen in a crowded theater or even rowdier dorm room. Which isn’t to say it’s dumb. Writers-directors Nick Kocher and Brian McEllhaney take some boldly clever swings in their high-concept (ahem) where a couple of college screw-ups (Stranger Things’ Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone) indulge in an experimental drug they find in their dorm room. However, the thing has such potent magical properties, it not only gets them high but causes them to break the space-time continuum with time-loops and fourth-wall breaks. They’re like a pair of blitzed Punxsutawney co-eds.

The only cure? Pizza, of course, which is down in the lobby if they can get down there in time—or face severe consequences. It’s a deliberately, heavily-baked concept, which Kocher describes as based on a true story. “In college, we had the idea. Everyone’s ordered food when they’re not fully sober and it’s difficult.” You can say that again, dude. – DC

Power Ballad

It is said that success is the child of many fathers while failure is an orphan. But that doesn’t mean every papa gets the credit they deserve, particularly in fields as competitive (and lucrative) as songwriting. Such is the appealing conceit of John Carney’s latest bittersweet laugher that looks into the music business with as much affection as there is contempt. They, in fact, walk hand-in-hand when Paul Rudd’s washed up wedding singer Rick meets Nick Jonas’ former boy band heartthrob searching for reinvention, Danny. The two jam and jive during a joyous night over drinks in Ireland, including when Rick shows a few of the pieces he’s working on, particularly a poignant ballad that’s only missing a bridge.

Six months later, the song has it, as does Danny who’s introduced it to the world as an instant sensation—and as a piece of musical magic he wrote solo. A bit of a music industry “Book of Job,” where Rudd’s hurt and aggrieved Rick must deal with the eye-rolls and second-guessing of nearly everyone in his life, from his bandmates to even his wife and daughter. There’s a lot of humor in the scenario, but plenty of pathos as Rudd gives one of the finest performances of his career. He’s a man losing his sanity and his even-keel, to the point where he must travel from the Emerald Isle to the City of Angels. – DC

Pretty Lethal

The loftiness of chasing perfection, and the physical demand of what many consider the highest performing art, has always made ballet a compelling subject for filmmakers. Storytellers often wish to track the psychic or physiological toll of achieving révérence—or at least contrasting it with gonzo, blood-splattered spectacle. Pretty Lethal attempts both in a daffy B-crowdpleaser that essentially Die Hards five prima ballerinas when they’re trapped in an eastern European den of iniquity run by a vamping Uma Thurman. 

The movie gets a lot of mileage out of its balletic heroines being decidedly not John McClane (or Ana de Armas in a John Wick movie, for that matter). Instead, they nervously use their on pointe routine to “Waltz of the Flowers” for a blood-soaked defense in a bar involving knives, shattered wine bottles, and knives in the slippers. Says star Maddie Ziegler, “We sort of came up with a style we’re calling ballet-fu, which was really fun. Because we referenced if you put a bunch of feral cats in a box, that was what we were doing to survive. But I think we used our strengths to our advantage,” complete by combining the input of stunt coordinators and ballet choreographers. Grace is harmony. – DC

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

In an age of so-called “elevated” and sober-minded horror cinema, it is a blessing from Mr. Le Bail that we have Radio Silence ready to turn up the gore and fun. The filmmaking collective behind Ready or Not, Abigail, and the best Scream movies made in this century return to their own blood-red haunts and splash new buckets of crimson in the delightfully sinister Ready or Not 2. Like its predecessor, this is a grinning romp suffused with eat-the-rich gallows humor as we revisit the Bride in the splattered dress (Samara Weaving) mere moments after she parted brutally with her groom for good. (He was in the process of trying to sacrifice her to Satan. As apparently one does in country estates.)

Unfortunately for Grace, there are plenty of other Devil-worshipping billionaires out there. It turns out to be a blessing for the audience, though, as she inevitably slaughters them alongside sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) during a new hide-and-seek game at a country club that looks suspiciously like Mar-a-Lago. As director Gillett acknowledges, “All of the institutions that we engage with, if you follow them fall enough, you’re probably going to find some form of corruption.”

The movie doesn’t quite reach the same highs as the first movie since we know the punchline this time, but the climax at an elite Satanic altar is every bit as giddy as the combustible billionaires last time, and Samara Weaving still knows how to deliver a killing parting shot. – DC

The Saviors

Filmmakers don’t get to choose whether their films will be “timely” or not. Movies take a long time to make and time itself, as you might have noticed, has a tendency to Inexorably March On. Rarely has there ever been a better case study of that phenomenon than the unusually (and completely accidentally) timely comedy thriller The Saviors. 

Adam Scott and Danielle Deadwyler star as Sean and Kim, a couple in a failing marriage who look to supplement their income by renting their shed to Amir and Jahan – a brother and sister from an undisclosed Middle Eastern nation played by Theo Rossi and Nazanin Boniadi. While Amir and Jahan seem nice, they’re also suspiciously interested in the president of the United States’ whereabouts and appear to be building some sort of dangerous device. But this can’t be what Sean and Kim think it is, right? They’re not bigots and this isn’t a mediocre season of 24… right?

Due to a confluence of events like a pandemic, two Hollywood work stoppages, and the general improbability of getting a movie produced at all, The Saviors took 10 years to make from conception to premiere. And in that 10 years, the world shifted away from Obama-era progressive optimism to a more overt return to Islamophobia with the United States even entering war with Iran just two weeks before the film’s premiere.  

“You know, there was a period in those 10 years when I thought the world had changed a bit, and maybe we should focus on a different project,” director and co-writer Kevin Hamedani says. “And then the world changed again, and suddenly The Saviors is even more timely, unfortunately.”

The Saviors’ incidental resonance to current events only enhances what is already a compelling narrative. Scott and Deadwyler shine as two ostensibly progressive individuals who need answers but don’t want to seem like Bradley Whitford’s “I’d have voted for Obama a third time if I could” character in Get Out. Hamedani and the script deftly guide the audience through those choppy waters, always leaving enough breadcrumbs so that the viewer doesn’t fully feel like Bradley Whitford either. The end result is a nifty little thriller that feels like The ‘Burbs for the Airbnb age. – AB

Seekers of Infinite Love

Though Seekers of Infinite Love may one day be a cult comedy, right now it’s literally a comedy about a cult… but also about family

Hannah Einbinder (Hacks), John Reynolds (Search Party), and Griffin Gluck (American Vandal) star as a trio of siblings who must rescue their sister from the clutches of the Peoples Temple-esque the Seekers of Infinite Love. Helping them on their mission is ex cult member-turned-cult deprogrammer Rick (Justin Theroux) and his wardrobe of tactical vests. 

According to writer/director Victoria Strouse, Seekers’ cult angle emerged unexpectedly late in the writing process of the script, which was featured on 2008’s Black List.

“I’m utterly fascinated by siblings and I think some of the complexities in sibling relationships, [it] kind of ends up talking so much about all human relationships,” she says. “As I was working on it, I became really interested in cults, this idea of a secondary but corrupt family.”

That fascination with family shines through with Einbinder, Reynolds, and Gluck evoking a believably agitated sibling unit, if not a believably genetic one with their diverse mix of heights and hair colors. While the end result could have used a little more cult whackiness to fully live up to its comedic potential, it’s hard to be disappointed with time spent on a road trip to oblivion with four very funny actors. – AB 

See You When I See You

Before 2025’s SXSW title The Baltimorons, indie filmmaking titan Jay Duplass had not directed a movie since 2012’s The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, opting to help shepherd other storytellers’ visions alongside his brother and producing partner Mark Duplass. But when fellow producing family Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon brought the script for See You When I See You his way, he knew he had to get behind the camera once again. “It just felt big and scary and like I couldn’t say no,” he says. 

It’s easy to see why the project appealed to Duplass. Written by comedian Adam Cayton-Holland, and based on his memoir Tragedy Plus Time, See You When I See You is an intensely personal story about Cayton-Holland’s PTSD following the death of his sister by suicide. Cooper Raiff (director and star of Cha Cha Real Smooth) steps in as the film’s Cayton-Holland analogue, Aaron, and does marvelous work unpacking the young man’s confused journey through grief.

Outside of some creative visual choices representing Aaron’s struggle to reclaim happy memories of his sister, See You When I See You doesn’t have much new to say about the grieving process. Ultimately though, that’s a feature, not a bug, as the rhythms of pain should resonate with anyone who has experienced real tragedy. Even if those experiences involve significantly less Third-Eye Blind and Sum 41 than Aaron’s. – AB

Sender

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever been sent in the mail? The answer to that question can range from the mundane—a gardening hat you didn’t order—to the truly bizarre. Actor David Dastmalchian, for one, tells us he was mailed dirty underwear more than once by an anonymous…. fan? “It was accompanied by a really bizarre letter,” the actor grimaces.

That’s obviously immediately creepy, yet writer-director Russell Goldman’s Sender takes an initially more innocuous stance before turning the screws. And according to Goldman, this too is based on real-life. “[Folks will] send you cheap objects that are related, most likely, to your search history online and any cookies or data can take from what you’re looking like. They send it to your home so they can write reviews in your name that are five stars, so those products can then get a boost on the algorithms.”

Sender takes that conceit to its most ominous, Hitchockian extreme when Britt Lower’s Julia receives a mysterious package from an even more mysterious, and threatening, source. – DC

Sinner Supper Club

Described as a “gay mumblecore ghost story” directors of Sinner Supper Club, Daisy Rosato and Nora Kaye, deliver exactly what is promised. Shot on an iPhone within six days and rooted in improvisation, the film is a scrappy documentation of a NYC-based friend group on the fritz during a heat wave. 

Gathered in a small apartment for Genevieve’s (Genevieve Simon) “eviction funeral,” tensions arise amidst the group over things big and small. On top of navigating their shared-traumatic experience, the death of a best friend, nothing seems to go right — a melted ice cream cake, the power going out, and worst of all, an uninvited partner is brought to the gathering. The night culminates in an unexpected, yet restorative, paranormal experience. 

Sinner Supper Club explores the surrealness of grief from an intrinsically queer perspective. It delivers comedic beats and moments of grief with the fluidity of a high-budget film. While there are moments of hesitance from the actors, the ensemble cast delivers a performance where you feel dropped in the middle of their hangout. – AH

They Will Kill You

The idea for They Will Kill You blossomed after director Kirill Sokolov stayed in an eerie hotel that he believed to be inhabited by a cult of old women. The fictionalized and much gorier version stars Zazie Beetz as the new housekeeper at a decadent hotel with a history of mysterious disappearances. As Sokolov brings her violent journey through the mysterious building to the big screen, the company explores countless genres, from mystery to slapstick to fantasy. 

“Kirill was always reminding us that yes, there’s action, and yes, there’s comedy, but also, at least for me, the most important thing was the truth at the moment,” Myha’la, who plays Beetz’s sister, says. “Then, if it feels truthful and honest and real to me and us in this moment, the comedy is going to come in the edit.” 

The highlight of the movie is the performances from actors like Patricia Arquette, Tom Felton, Heather Graham, and the aforementioned sister duo. They expertly balance multiple styles and tropes, giving the movie an edge in an arguably oversaturated genre.  

“It is genre-defying because it is a love story about two sisters, and that’s really at the core of everything, and then you mix in the brilliant Kung Fu and gore and martial arts and heroism,” Felton says. “It’s a unique blend. I don’t think a film has ever been made quite like this.” – SR 

Time and Water

“The future we were warned about is no longer distant, it is here.” This is the message that Oscar-nominated director Sara Dosa shares in her newest documentary Time and Water. Through archival material and the writings of Icelandic author, Andri Snær Magnason, Dosa puts together an expansive story focused on generational memory and humanity’s relationship with nature. 

Centered on Magnason’s own family ties, Time and Water captures the vast existence of Icelandic glaciers and the tremendous loss felt by the author as he witnesses the disappearance of these titans, and the passing of his grandparents. The audience is transported through the passing of time and experiences the indelible impression humans make on the world and people around them.  

“There is something radical about love, especially in a time that is so polarizing,” Dosa says. “Wherever we can center love and joy amid the doom and the apocalyptic stories abound, I think it could inspire hope…I think it can give a sense of a light in the dark to keep people working toward the change that we so badly need.” 

Time and Water is a stark wake-up call, not only to protect the planet we call home, but to cherish our time with loved ones. The future is now, and Dosa captures the course we took to get here. – AH

Wishful Thinking

It sometimes feels impossible to be happy—even with someone you love—when there’s so much bad news in the world. So imagine the pressure Julia and Charlie (Maya Hawke and Lewis Pullman) are under in Wishful Thinking, a supremely clever and wholesome romantic comedy where the fate of Portland, Oregon, if not the world, rests on the straining romance of two young people at a crossroads in their life. As it slowly dawns on them, when things are good in their domestic life, Julia is suddenly up for a promotion at work, and Charlie’s crypto investments are skyrocketing. When they’re unhappy with each other, literal earthquakes can occur.

It’s a shrewd use of magical realism to entertain wish fulfillment—like literally getting rich off crypto after a particularly sexy date night—but also comment on the pressures we put on each other in the modern world, particularly for those who are as socially entangled and plugged in as the film’s Gen-Z antiheroes. It’s an indie rom-com about the challenge of early adult romances, complete with a big swing ending. But it finds an innovative way to engage these elements, especially when Hawke and Pullman are simpatico—and perhaps even more so when they’re not. – DC

Woodstockers

We were delighted to welcome film and TV mainstay Corbin Bernsen back to the Den of Geek Studio at SXSW to chat about his indie TV pilot, Woodstockers. This time, Bernsen–who is the showrunner, writer, and star– was joined by his son, Oliver, who directed the pilot episode (he also had a feature-length directorial debut, Bagworm, play at the festival).

The delightfully funny dramedy puts the audience in the headspace of an aging hippie confronting life, death, and a bygone era and its legacy set against scenic upstate New York. Our conversation was introspective as the Bernsen’s grappled with deep conversations on set, Corbin’s own career journey, which launched during that period in 1967, and their excitement for independent filmmaking in the television space. Their commitment to the form paid off: Woodstockers took home an Audience award. Now that’s Flower Power. – Chris Longo

Television

Are We Still Married?

Indie TV pilot Are We Still Married? stars Dustin Milligan as Jack, a husband who has been turned into a vampire via a bite from a mysterious bat, and Taylor Misiak as Laura, his wife who isn’t sure whether we should let him back in the house. While that is undoubtedly a bold genre concept, the inspiration for the story came from a real life experience for writer/director Kit Steinkellner (who also created the Facebook Watch series Sorry For Your Loss).

“My husband did get bit by a bat,” she tells Den of Geek. “It was that kind of crazy thing that doesn’t happen except when it does. He got a rabies shot and was OK. I don’t know how you process trauma in your marriage but comedic bits are our go-to. So we just started cracking vampire jokes. At a certain point, he was like ‘but if I were a vampire, you would let me back in the house, right?’ I paused and he didn’t like that pause.”

Through the safety of her closed kitchen window, Laura peppers Jack with questions about vampirism that he doesn’t have the answers to (the bat didn’t exactly explain all the rules of this whole thing). Steinkellner and the actors make beautiful work of the premise, both having fun with the genre silliness of it all while also delving into the pathos of a loving marriage interrupted by a truly unforeseeable calamity. Coming in at just 15 minutes long, Are We Still Married? serves as a compelling proof of concept for whatever direction, and medium, Steinkellner wants to take the story from here.

“I did write a feature inspired by this that was on this past year’s Blacklist. At the same time, in having this conversation with South by, a part of the independent pilot requirement is to submit a series bible. I’ve actually not done this with other ideas before but I have pretty thoroughly explored both options. Ultimately I just want to keep telling this story.” – AB

The Audacity

Have you ever wondered where the wunderkind techbros of Silicon Valley get the audacity? Thankfully so has Jonathan Glatzer, a former writer on Succession and Better Call Saul and now the creator and showrunner of AMC’s fittingly named The Audacity. 

“For years, I thought of audacity as a kind of superpower that we all have, but few of us actually employ because it involves crashing through norms of behavior. Most of us are not bulls in China shops, but in Silicon Valley, it is kind of regarded as an attribute. There’s a lot of broken dishes around there, but that’s what they like: move fast and break things,” he says.

Through its first three episodes, The Audacity doesn’t move fast, but it does break some things. Billy Magnussen (a compelling character actor probably best known for Game Night and Made For Love) steps into the megalomaniacal shoes of Hypergnosis CEO Duncan Park. Eager to prove that he’s much more than the product of some well-timed good luck, Duncan leverages his relationship with his therapist Joanne Felder to gain some (flagrantly illegal) advantages over his competition. 

The Audacity excels as a slice of life look at the excesses (and yes, audacity) of Silicon Valley’s elite in the rapidly expanding AI era. While its early episodes come off as more of a vibe in search of a story, the level of talent both behind and in front of the camera suggests that it has plenty of room to grow. – AB

The Comeback Season 3

Since The Comeback first premiered in 2005, Valerie Cherish has always returned to TV when it needs her the most. The first season of the HBO comedy found the aging sitcom diva played by Lisa Kudrow trying to navigate the brave new world of reality TV, recording her comeback as Aunt Sassy on new sitcom “Room and Bored.” In 2014’s season 2, Valerie attempted to get in on the Bravo-fication of the medium by pitching a pilot to Andy Cohen. Now, with The Comeback’s third and final season, Valerie is set to tackle television’s gravest challenge yet: artificial intelligence.

“[The Comeback] began with what everyone thought was the first extinction event [of TV], which was reality TV, eliminating scripted television for the more economical – no rules, no unions,” Kudrow says. “Happily that wasn’t the end. [Co-creator Michael Patrick King and I] were having lunch and he was like ‘What about this: Valerie is finally offered the lead in a multi-camera sitcom but it’s written about AI.’”

The Comeback season 3’s eight episodes present yet another comedic masterclass of industry satire and character-building. There’s never been someone quite like Valerie Cherish on television and there is unlikely to be ever again. The fading superstar is desperate for fame yet uniquely ill-equipped to handle it, spending much of her adult life flourishing in front of sitcom studio multicams while putting her foot in her mouth in front of documentary single cams. 

The Comeback’s satire is so subtle as to be barely visible. Really it’s the story of a singular character who refuses to let her story end regardless of how many times the industry tries to close the book… and all the humiliation she endures with a grin because of it. Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King give Valerie Cherish the ending she so richly deserves, but we’ll miss her all the same. – AB

The Dark Wizard

The history of rock climbing is rife with larger-than-life characters and adventure sport trailblazers, but few loom as large as Dean Potter. A climber, high-liner, BASE jumper and all around Yosemite Valley Renaissance man, Potter set speed records and free soloed daunting walls at an unprecedented caliber for the duration of his career. Now, Peter Mortimer and Nick Rosen – documentary filmmakers and Potter’s old friends – are bringing his story to HBO Max with their new docuseries, “The Dark Wizard.” 

“His aura and myth dominated the sport, both because he was pioneering all these crazy things … but there was also a much broader story there, the behind the scenes and what was going on in his personal world that was really compelling that no one had really heard about,” Rosen says. 

“The Dark Wizard” not only details Potter’s Herculean feats and the impact he had on the climbing community, but also his mental health journey that took place behind the closed doors of an alpha facade. 

“It’s unbelievable seeing all these Olympic athletes talk about their mental health and the struggles,” Mortimer says. “That just was not happening back in the time.” 

The only documentation of Potter’s internal dialogues were in his journals, which his sister donated to the filmmaking duo so they could platform the realities of his life. Using stylistic images and animations from these diaries, alongside interviews with Potter and his inner circle, Mortimer and Rosen crafted a chilling recapitulation of the climber’s life. – SR 

Margo’s Got Money Troubles

Margo’s got money troubles, sure. But she’s also got some big expectations to meet. The Apple TV dramedy entered the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival as the undisputed TV headliner, thanks to the involvement of two prestige studios (A24 and the aforementioned Apple TV), a legendary TV showrunner (David E. Kelley), and a high-powered cast that would fit right in at this year’s Oscars ceremony (Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman, Nicole Kidman, and more). Still, it’s one thing to have a lot of expensive toys; it’s another thing entirely to know how to play with them. Thankfully, Margo’s Got Money Troubles puts forward an eight-episode experience well worthy of its creative firepower. 

Based on a novel of the same name by Rufi Thorpe, Margo stars Elle Fanning as the titular young woman with money problems due to an unexpected pregnancy following a tryst with her douchey literature professor. Anticipating little help from her ex-Hooters waitress mother (Pfeiffer) or professional wrestler estranged father (Offerman), Margo gets creative (and sometimes nekkid) to pay the bills. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is Juno for the OnlyFans generation. It’s also the rare “prestige” episodic experience that doesn’t feel like a two-hour movie script that got out of hand. That’s all thanks to a preposterously charming lead performance from Fanning and her equally likable supporting cast. – AB

The post Everything We Saw at SXSW 2026: I Love Boosters, Wishful Thinking, The Comeback, and More appeared first on Den of Geek.

The following contains major spoilers for Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man There’s no denying that Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is an emotional journey. A feature film that also serves as both a grand finale to six years of a beloved television series and something like a bridge to its future, it’s a movie that […]

The post How Does The Immortal Man Lead Into the Peaky Blinders Sequel? appeared first on Den of Geek.

The braintrusts that have presided over SXSW since nearly its inception have always smiled on the festival for its contrasts. It’s a fest where south meets west, and music meets film, meets technology, meets comedy, meets plain ol’ innovation. And in no other year has that felt more like a lived-in ethos than 2026, which saw everything happening everywhere and all at once (heh).

With the film, TV, music, activation, and cornucopia of other moments all occurring simultaneously in Austin, it was a whirlwind that can nearly overwhelm. Yet the Den of Geek team was there for almost all of it, covering what we can, and bringing it to you in this handy, dandy round-up.

Movies

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist

At the turn of the century, the world was excited by the prospect of new technology. The internet was a shiny toy, the dot com bubble hadn’t burst, and the iPod (never mind the iPhone) was still a glint in Steve Jobs’ eye. Filmmaker Daniel Kwan and technology ethicist Tristan Harris remember those days as a bit like a lost kingdom. After all, the world it has wrought has very little good cheer left in the public for new tech, especially with the AI revolution that is now commencing.

“With social media, we were not great stewards of that technology and how it rolled out,” Harris observes in the Den of Geek studio. “We created the most anxious and depressed generation of our lifetime, even though some of the people who were building it—the people who started Instagram, they were my dorm mates at Stanford—they didn’t intend for that to happen.” Which raises the question of why should folks have any confidence that many of the same companies and technology leaders will do better with the far more powerful prospect of artificial intelligence.

That conundrum is something which both men are confronting in the new Daniel Roher documentary, The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which Kwan is also a producer on. As the title suggests, the film examines both the most pessimistic and rosiest predictions for AI’s future, and everything in between. All possibilities are running rampant in Silicon Valley while billion-dollar companies dash madly toward being the first to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Yet the film also interrogates what tools can be put in place to create better stewards in the next generation. As Oscar-winner Kwan notes, “I think Big Tech has broken our social contract that we have as a society with technology. They have used our world as a playground to basically consolidate more power and more resources. The technology that they’re building—even though a lot of the architects and the technicians building this stuff, they have the greatest intentions and the greatest ideals of what this technology can do—the fact that it is being deployed within this current system, within this current incentive structure, it is taking a neutral technology and turning it into an extractive one.” – David Crow

Amazing Live Sea Monkeys

As the large, colorful gates open to Yolanda Signorelli’s Maryland estate, she’s without electricity, feeding woodland creatures tiny crackers – an unexpectedly intimate introduction to the woman at the center of The Amazing Live Sea Monkeys. Directed by Mark Becker and Aaron Schock, the documentary uses the nostalgia of comic books and the ‘60s to showcase an oddly complex legal saga and the history of the beloved “instant life” toy while uncovering lesser-known details about its creator, Harold von Braunhut. At its core is a David-and-Goliath-style battle between Signorelli, often called the “mother of Sea-Monkeys,” and Big Time Toys, which began licensing and distributing the product in 2007.

Through interviews with Signorelli, her lawyer, journalists, former collaborators, and illustrators behind the brand’s imagery, the film tells the story while keeping the people behind it at the center. Signorelli’s love for animals and the sea monkeys shine through all aspects of the film; Schock even told us that revealing the “sea monkey secret formula” was always a concern of Signorelli while filming. Throughout the documentary, Becker and Schock never shy away from examining von Braunhut’s various controversies in vivid detail. At the same time, the filmmakers didn’t want to lump Signorelli and her passion into the worst of what her former husband had done. It was complex, captivating, and perfectly fit for a SXSW premiere. – Darcie Zudell

American Dollhouse

John Valley doesn’t want to reinvent cinema with his movie, American Dollhouse. The story of a struggling woman named Sarah (Hailley Laurèn), who inherits her childhood home only to be beset by unstable neighbor Kelly (Kelsey Pribilski), follows in the tradition of horror greats, including Psycho, Peeping Tom, and Black Christmas. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have bigger things on its mind.

“I’m obsessed with how a slasher can be minimalist, but yet a container for huge, modern ideas,” Valley tells Den of Geek. “I stuck to the conventions and tropes, and kept telling the cast that it’s just a meat and potatoes slasher film, but we also tried to find some new, modern life in it.”

Part of that work fell on Pribilski, who had to embody an adult who has reverted to a childlike state in frightening ways. “I thought about how an eight-year-old acts. They’re a little bit animated because we as adults have learned to contain our emotions,” Pribilski reveals. “It was about knowing when to go bigger. We had to choose very carefully the moments for me to go into ‘grizzly bear’ mode, as John would call it.”

As Pribilski got to play big moments, it fell on her co-star Laurèn to keep things grounded in reality. “Sarah is a full person, and it was important to me that, when she makes a decision, it doesn’t come out of nowhere,” she says. That approach makes Sarah a formidable opponent, even for a killer as strange as Kelly. “Sarah’s a loyal fighter, for herself and the people she loves. She’s not going to just go down.”

Thanks to the work of Pribilski and Lauren, American Dollhouse adds a great new killer and final girl to the slasher tradition. – Joe George

Black Zombie

In a pop culture saturated with zombie shows like The Walking Dead and The Last of Us, many have forgotten the roots of Z-culture. Writer-director Maya Annik Bedward is not one of them. Right down to the title of Black Zombie conjuring the racist shadow of the nearly century-old Hollywood film White Zombie (1932), Bedward’s haunting documentary looks at more than a hundred years of appropriation, reinvention, and evolution of a concept that’s rooted in the vast sweep of African diaspora, and the Black Haitian experience of revolution in particular.

“In Haiti, everyone knows about the zombie, and in Haiti, stories of zombies and zombification are regularly talked about,” says Bedward. “It’s adjacent to vodou, but it’s not an everyday practice. Zombification is these stories of ‘I saw zombies in the field,’ and very connected to these ideas of enslavement.” These are the roots which inspired the white fiction that in turn gave the world their beloved modern flesh-easters. Black Zombie observes, critiques, and even at times celebrates this transition—within limits as the othered monster has increasingly become a symbol for tearing down sinister systems. Or just a fear of the status quo breaking… – DC

Brian 

Multiple castmates in Will Ropp’s directorial debut, Brian, were student body presidents in high school; a connection they didn’t make until SXSW. Ben Wang, who plays the titular character running for student body president to impress his crush, says he drew from his own awkward quirks when portraying the role. Edi Patterson and Randall Park play Wang’s parents, who care a little too much that their son finally made a friend. William H. Macy, who plays Brian’s therapist, talks Brian through his various panic attacks and struggles with mental health that cause him to lose roles in drama club, freak out his classmates, and annoy his friends. Meanwhile, his cool English teacher, portrayed by Natalie Morales, just wants to help Brian develop his party platform without indulging his inappropriate attraction to her. 

It’s a coming of age movie about mental health and the messy aspects of high school, but even more than that, the script by Mike Scollins is effortlessly funny in a way that will have you quoting Patterson’s and Park’s one-liners long after the first watch. Speaking of Patterson and Park, they got to have a lot of fun improvising during some dining room table scenes. Brian’s a good time, but one that will yank its audiences’ right back to high school in a visceral and emotional way.  – DZ 

Chasing Summer

Directed by Josephine Decker and written by leading lady, Iliza Shlesinger, Chasing Summer is a romantic comedy that is sexy, realistic, and overwhelmingly nostalgic. 

Jamie (Shlesinger) returns to her Texas hometown after a breakup, shocked to find that while the small hamlet may look the same, the people within it have changed. She picks up her old job at the roller rink, now owned by her sister (Cassidy Freeman), and meets Harper (Lola Tung), her young co-worker. Harper convinces Jamie to attend a party, where she meets a much younger Colby (Garrett Wareing). The two pursue a questionable fling while Jamie rekindles relationships with old high school classmates, including her ex-boyfriend, Chase (Tom Welling). The rest of the story is a sticky recreation of summer love that invokes the refreshing feeling of stepping into AC.

At times predictable, the film also has moments of shock, including a soap-opera-level reveal that will leave middle-aged women everywhere swooning. It is a retrospective on summers of days past, and the inevitability of moving on. It’s conventional, easy, and delivers the promise of a classic romcom. – Alexandra Hopkins

Crash Land 

What happens when a group of amateur stuntmen try to make a “real movie” so they can prove their worth to a town that hates them? Crash Land, directed by Dempsey Bryk, answers that very question. 

“It came out of COVID,” Bryk says. “I was stuck with my brother and my entire family… living behind the couches in the living room, as you do, and I was watching this Jackass marathon on loop and the idea blossomed out of there.” The film evokes classics of the genre – think Napoleon Dynamite, Superbad, and Bottle Rocket – against a Canadian backdrop of charming chaos. 

“There was a process of trying to make it not like anything else after being so inspired your entire life by the things you love, and then you have to try to find your own voice,” Bryk says. 

As Crash Land follows this group of boys becoming men one wipeout at a time, it simultaneously tells another coming of age story. The spirit behind Crash Land is the much more successful story of Dempsey Bryk and his brother Billy, who plays the emotional catalyst of the movie. Through his influence, the characters crash and land in a world that is fun, endearing, and unexpectedly touching. – Sophia Rooksberry 

Drag

Horror movies often tend to revolve around similar, oftentimes outlandish, concepts: A deranged killer, a disturbing monster, a haunted setting. But Drag, the debut feature film from Raviv Ullman and Greg Yagolnitzer, finds a scary story in an everyday, all-too-human problem. Yes, it’s a movie that’s really about the terrifying specter of lower back pain. 

The film stars Lizzy Caplan and Lucy DeVito as a pair of frequently-at-odds siblings who find themselves in increasing trouble during a house robbery gone wrong. When one of the pair throws their back out mid-heist, the other must help her escape by dragging her from the house’s upstairs bathroom down to the waiting car. Painfully uncomfortable (and often downright grisly) acts of body horror ensue, with plenty of gross-out details in full close-up even as they discover that the man they’ve come to rob is not everything he appears to be. – Lacy Baugher

Drift 

SXSW needs an Action Documentary screening section solely for Drift to exist in. Described by director Deon Taylor as a real life Catch Me If You Can, the documentary stars real-life action hero Isaac Wright as he recounts his career going to unprecedented heights for his art.

“The documentary is a lot more than just my artwork,” Wright says. “It has to do with my life and what I feel like my artwork really represents and a full portrait of what I think the goal of life is.” 

Under the artist name Drift, he climbs to the very top of the country’s tallest buildings capturing the most breathtaking and adrenaline-spiking photos, slowly working toward his dream of summiting the Empire State Building. 

“We went to the Instagram and these beautiful photos are just so captivating that it’s really overwhelming, and wondering why the hell he’s up there and what he’s doing was my initial reaction,” Roxanne Avent Taylor, the film’s producer, says. 

The documentary answers those questions in an exploration of the human spirit, as the occasional illegality of Drift’s climbs resulted in a multi-year battle with law enforcement across multiple states. 

“I believed that everyone could connect to the human story based on the fact that we’ve all been through something,” Taylor says. “We’ve all been misrepresented or someone has tried to tear down your character in some way.” 

On its surface, Drift is an action thriller come to life. At its core, Drift is a tear-jearking testament to a freedom that only the birds and the film’s namesake have experienced. – SR

Family Movie

When watching Family Movie, a chipper-oddball indie directed by Kevin Bacon and starring Kevin Bacon, as well as wife Kyra Sedgwick, daughter Sosie Bacon, and son Travis Bacon, one gets the sense that this is not what a real family flick with the Bacons would look like. At least you’d hope so! But given how mirthful this splatter-comedy is when their fictional doppelgängers are forced to deal with a murderer on the set of their horror movie-within-a-horror movie, you nonetheless feel like you’re sitting across from the gang during a lively game night.

“I think the movie definitely reflects on all our personalities individually and how we relate to each other,” Travis explains. “There’s definitely some little moments like that, but we’re still acting.”

Kevin later adds that screenwriter Dan Beers was able to collect some surprisingly accurate depictions of interpersonal dynamics after interviewing them each separately. Says the director: “When we got the first draft of the script, we were like, ‘Holy shit, how did you know that?!’ And it’s not like it’s pieces of dirt… it’s just ways of being.” – DC

Forbidden Fruits

A title like Forbidden Fruits suggests a heavy drama, thick with Biblical overtones and meditations on the nature of sin. Yet, one look at the new movie starring Lili Reinhart as the leader of a witch cult of mall girls promises the exact opposite, presenting itself as a spunky horror comedy.

However, according to director Meredith Alloway, religion weighs heavily on the story. “I love the idea that women are told that we’re quite literally the origin of evil and sin,” Alloway tells Den of Geek, a theme that goes all the way to the source material, the play “Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die” by Lily Houghton, who cowrote the screenplay with Alloway. 

Alloway continues, “When I read the play, I see all these women reclaiming that. Witchcraft and being in a coven are ways to make that narrative ours. I think when women get together and set an intention, whether it’s magic or literally just talking at a sleepover, that is really powerful.”

As Apple, Reinhart gathers a team of women to join her coven, including Lola Tung as Pumpkin, Victoria Pedretti as Cherry, and Alexandra Shipp as Fig,” all characters who are more than they initially appear. 

“No one’s playing a stereotype,” says Pedretti. “There are a lot of cues that might lead you to misjudge these women before you get to know them. Each character ends up surprising the audience with their humanity.”

“I think we all play very complex human individuals who just so happen to be born in a female body in this lifetime, who are trying to navigate the structures of our world,” adds Shipp.

In other words, the characters are richer and more complicated than one might think, just like Forbidden Fruits itself. – JG

The Fox 

Ever wanted to get in bed with a fox voiced by Olivia Colman? Well, Jai Courtney got to in Dario Russo’s The Fox, a magical realism comedy about what happens when people try to change themselves for their partners. Emily Browning reluctantly agrees to marry Courtney’s character, Nick, while secretly having an affair with her boss (Damon Herriman), who is also cheating on his wife (Claudia Doumit). In an effort to win their partner back, Nick listens to a fox he was moments away from killing in the woods, leading all the characters down a hole where they literally lose themselves. 

Russo directed, wrote, and scored The Fox, so naturally he had a very specific vision for the fantasy and comedy elements of the film. Russo says he finds it really annoying when characters in films deliver an over-exaggerated reaction to talking animals, so in this universe, talking foxes are the least out-of-the-ordinary thing. Though they didn’t really act alongside Colman, Doumit and Browning were obsessed with her narration; Browning says she listened to a recording of Colman’s voice acting over and over again on a run one time. The film is as ambitious as it is mystical, but it never loses its ability to make fun of the chaos and camp of it all. – DZ

He Bled Neon

With all its neon lights and gleeful indulgence of vice, Las Vegas has always made for a popular movie setting. Still, Vegas-native and He Bled Neon producer Nate Bolotin felt there was a certain kind of movie that Sin City had not yet played host to. 

“Twenty years ago, my step brother and best friend passed away. I got a text message from a mutual friend, just like how it happens in the movie actually, and had to go back and bury him and reconnect with the people that I had lost touch with. Someone came up to me at the funeral and said ‘hey, I think there’s some foul player here’ but we never went too deep. Fifteen years later or so it just clicked: we haven’t seen a Vegas revenge noir thriller in a world outside the Vegas strip.”

True to Bolotin’s real life experiences, He Bled Neon picks up with successful businessman Ethan (Joe Cole) receiving the fateful text and returning home to Las Vegas where he reconnects with his old crew (which includes characters played by Marshawn Lynch, Rita Ora, and Ismael Cruz Cordova) and begins to unpack the mystery of his brother Darren’s (Paul Wesley) death.

He Bled Neon aces the set-up, largely thanks to the colorful sensibilities of director Drew Kirsch and electronic soundscapes of composers Joe Trapanese and DJ Zhu. Once the revenge plot moves into the desert and grimy environs outside the strip, however, the film loses its distinctive sense of place and settles into a disappointingly conventional crime story. – Alec Bojalad

Hokum

Irish filmmaker Damian McCarthy became a SXSW Midnighter hero when 2024’s Oddity took home the festival’s Audience Award. Now he’s returned to Austin with some extra star power in tow. The horror auteur’s next spooky effort, Hokum, stars Severance’s Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman, an American novelist who absconds to a remote Irish inn to scatter his parents’ ashes and finish his latest book. Of course, it just so happens that this particular inn contains a honeymoon suite that is said to be haunted by an ancient witch…

Speaking of hauntings, Hokum’s first act is haunted by a weak characterization of Scott’s Ohm, whose lifetime of unaddressed grief has apparently manifested itself as a need to be a real dick. Once the movie gives way to the charismatic actor’s charm and McCarthy begins to flex his horror muscles, the back half blossoms into a pleasingly macabre experience. It’s also quite dark. Literally. 

“It’s dark in the film, and it was literally dark when we were in there making it,” Scott told Den of Geek. “It was pretty clear that this was going to be unsettling. As an actor, since your control is limited, you never know really how something is going to turn out at the end of the day. Having so much faith in Damian and seeing all the components they put together on set, I knew there was a chance that this could work.”  And indeed Hokum does work. – AB

I Love Boosters

Three projects into his burgeoning film career, it’s fair to say that Boots Riley has developed a house style. For a lesser creative, that level of one-note fixation might begin to grow stale. Thankfully, the marriage of the surreal with leftist politics is a note that this rapper, songwriter, and record-producer-turned-filmmaker knows how to play quite well. And he continues to do so in I Love Boosters.

Keke Palmer stars as Corvette, an aspiring fashion designer who ekes out a living as a “booster,” pinching high-end textiles and selling them to her neighborhood at a discount. Together with her friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), Corvette sets her booster sights on high-end fashion entrepreneur Christie Smith (Demi Moore) to close the fashion gap between the haves and have-nots.

Like Sorry to Bother You before it, I Love Boosters’ premise is merely a jumping off point for all the vivid imagery and offbeat twists to come. The movie that a ticket-buyer expects to see at minute 0 is very much not the movie they experience by minute 60 or so. Unlike Sorry to Bother You, however, Boosters’ absurdist twist isn’t a completely out-of-left-field human-animal hybrid situation but a far more mundane science fiction tool that we won’t spoil. Despite the relatively conventional sci-fi trappings of its back half, I Love Boosters feels satisfyingly anarchic and bizarre all the way through. – AB

Imposters 

The idea of changelings, body snatchers, or other false creatures that are somehow swapped into existing families without any of their members being the wiser is nightmare fuel from time immemorial. Imposters takes this idea and runs with it, crafting a story that wrestles with ideas of parenthood, commitment, and fear. 

The film stars Jessica Rothe and Charlie Barnett as Paul and Marie, a couple forced to contend with any parent’s worst nightmare when their baby mysteriously disappears. While everyone is convinced the resident Town Creep is responsible, Marie’s not so sure, and when she turns to the mysterious Orson (Bates Wilder) for help, he sends her to a mysterious cave in the woods. But the child Marie brings back from the forest may not be the son she lost.

A genre-bending film that’s full of the sort of twists even seasoned moviegoers will likely not see coming, that explores the all-too-human pain of love and loss through a filter that’s covered with no small amount of blood. – LB

Kill Me

At first glance, Kill Me seems to ask the question, “What if Charlie Kelly woke up in a bathtub of his own blood?” But with a deeply emotional and revelatory performance from Charlie Day, the horror-dramedy becomes so much more. Sure, our main character, Jimmy, lives in a dingy apartment a la Charlie and Frank, and his frenetic energy while trying to solve his own murder attempt harkens back to a Pepe Silvia obsession… but that’s not a bad thing. The audience is immediately comforted by the familiarity of Day’s impeccable comedic timing right before adjusting to the sobering reality that his character has a history of trying to take his own life—making him the perfect choice to carry the emotional weight of this film. 

Jimmy meets his match in Allison Williams’ 911 operator, Margot. She grounds both him and a film that turns into an unlikely whodunit. Williams has also become something of a scream queen over the last decade (starring in Get Out, M3GAN, The Perfection), but pure horror this film is not. Similarly to Day, she brings the authenticity and depth needed to be Jimmy’s “straight man” as she navigates the hijinks of solving a maybe-murder while healing from her own trauma. 

It’s a feat to address subject matter as serious as suicide while ensuring the audience knows they’re allowed to laugh—and a lot for that matter. Director Peter Warren tactfully displays both ends of the spectrum that people with mental illness can experience: the dramatics of suicide attempts but also the mundanity of ordering the same meal every day for months. In his own words, “Depression and mental illness are incredibly dangerous but can also be dumb and annoying. It’s like stepping on a rake a million times in your head.” – Britt Migs

Lainey Wilson: Keepin’ Country Cool

Amy Scott is the director behind Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately? and Sheryl, proving an affinity for documentary storytelling about some of the music industry’s most iconic names. Now, she is bringing the story of modern country idol Lainey Wilson to Netflix.

Lainey Wilson: Keepin’ Country Cool is set to premiere globally on April 22. It follows the country star on her ascent to major stardom while traveling the country on the “Country’s Cool Again Tour” in 2024. 

“After a while, it was apparent that we weren’t chasing the tour, we were chasing Lainey,” Scott says. “Her life is all over the place. Her life is not a straight line, so we just tried to hold onto that mechanical bull ride.” 

While being jostled around the country and holding on for dear life, Scott and her team discovered the heart of Wilson’s music and her musical persona. Not only are her powerful vocals and charisma emblematic of industry titans like Dolly Parton, but her compassion and grit are what give her music, and this documentary, their spirit. 

“Vulnerablilty can come in many different flavors,” Scott says. “It can be vulnerability about struggles, but vulnerability also is when you can be funny and have a really unguarded, self-deprecating nature, and we realized early on that (Lainey) is really, really funny.”

Throughout the documentary, Wilson is seen constantly songwriting when she isn’t rehearsing or performing. She has spent her career banking songs for upcoming records, using her determination and open heart as fodder for the future of her skyrocketing career; Scott’s latest project delivers all of these details in a way that is careful, exciting, and, of course, incredibly cool. – SR

Leviticus

The land down under has long been a reliable source of uniquely upsetting films, from Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) to Lake Mungo (2008), but Australian horror has enjoyed a renaissance as of late, thanks to hits such as The Babadook (2014) and Talk to Me (2022). 

Director Adrian Chiarella continues that tradition with his debut, Leviticus, which stars Joe Bird of Talk to Me and Stacy Clausen as two gay teens forced to participate in a conversion ritual by a fundamentalist pastor. The ritual releases a malevolent entity that takes the form of the person the victim most desires, which, for the boys, is one another.

“When I started thinking about things that were personal to me as a gay man, I knew that homophobia was something that I wanted to tackle in a film,” Chiarella tells Den of Geek. “There’s a clue in the word: homophobia is a fear. So I started digging deeper into what that might look like through the lens of this genre.”

The stars of Leviticus followed Chiarella’s lead by playing the reality of their characters’ plight. “I think that horror films are, in a way, dramas with horror elements because the emotions are so real and raw,” observes Bird. “It’s not like I was filming a horror film in one scene and a romance film in others. These were just real, natural people going through this experience.”

Chiarella adds, “I knew the horror element wouldn’t work unless you were really invested in the connection between these two lead characters.” To that end, he sent Bird and Clausen out on various field trips to build their characters. Those trips included visits to the country because, like any other good piece of Australian horror, the terror in Leviticus comes from the landscape. – JG

Mam

Part of the appeal of film festivals like SXSW is the chance for audiences to take in both mid-budget blockbusters bound for big theaters and the indie-est indies that ever indie-d. Projects like Over Your Dead Body and I Love Boosters occupy the former space on 2026’s SXSW roster. Mam is very much part of the latter. 

Directed by Nan Feix, Mam is an unabashed love letter to Vietnamese cuisine, New York’s Chinatown, and love itself. It’s also a novel blend of fictional narrative and documentary. While Mam is fully scripted, it recounts the real life story of chef Jerald Head as he moves to New York from Texas and tries to make it in the culinary world. Playing Head and his wife and business partner Nhung Dao Head are Head and Nhung themselves, who now own and operate Mắm on Forsyth Street. 

Shot in a scant 16 days (usually after a shift at the restaurant, Head revealed in a post-screen Q&A), Mam wears its lowkey indie status on its sleeve. The rough-around-the-edge film is unlikely to have a second life outside of Austin. But for 81 pleasant minutes, it made festival-goers in Alamo Drafthouse’s auditorium 5 very, very hungry. – AB

Manhood

What is likely to earn points as the most unusual and eyebrow-raising documentary at this year’s festival (or perhaps almost any other) is Daniel Lombroso’s Manhood, a sober look at the growing popularity of “male enhancement” cosmetic procedures (read: penis enlargement). It’s a subject ripe for ridicule or late night comedy, and yet the film takes a clinical lens that flits between aloof and sympathetic, depending on the interviewee. All are part of a larger line, though, of dudes willing to sell their house or risk their mortgages to increase their girth.

Astutely setting the film primarily in the Dallas and Miami areas of the South, Lombroso pulls at a thread from a previous documentary—his depressingly prescient study of the then fringe elements of the alt-right in the Atlantic’s White Noise (2020)—to draw a link between the manosphere culture of supplemental pills and Joe Rogan-like podcasts, and a lot of the guys desperate to add a few inches at any cost. Yet there’s perhaps a bit more empathy for the younger and more vulnerable parties who get taken for a ride and permanently disfigured by grifters with white coats and needles stuffed with filler.

The film could draw a stronger link in its thesis between the modern culture that its title obviously evokes and the guys on the table, but it finds both pathos and condemnation to varying degrees for alleged “medical” predators, and the type of souls who end up thinking they need to have this procedure done. One wishes to spend more time with the partners who often shrug they don’t even care. – DC

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice

Writer-director BenDavid Grabinski might have been too young to make movies in the ‘90s, but he was definitely watching them. And nowadays he appears to be determined to bring a flavor of them back, complete with a hard-swaggering, high-concept genre exercise starring Vince Vaughn at his most confident. A movie about gangsters, parties, and time travel, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is a bit like if Swingers, Go, and Back to the Future had a half-forgotten love child who we’re now only meeting as an adult. And that’s meant as a compliment.

As the title suggests, this is a love triangle served in four parts after gangster Nick (Vaughn) time travels about half a year into the past in order to stop his slightly younger self (also Vaughn) from murdering their best friend Mike (James Marsden) for the affair he’s carrying on with Nick’s unhappy wife, Alice (Eiza González). It’s a gonzo premise that is treated with just enough seriousness to give meat to the idea of considering second chances—whether through the magic of a proverbial “undo” button,  or where you’d even want to hit it to fix a bad mistake. As González notes in our studio, “I always connect with moving forward. I think there’s something beautiful about the chaos. Some of the craziest, most beautiful things that happened in my life have come from real terrible circumstances and bad moments”

Still, in its heart, this movie is all about the vibes, as indicated by its structure being based around the “PARTY,” “AFTERPARTY,” and “AFTER-AFTER-AFTERPARTY” which its main quartet crashes while trading barbs in a screenplay with more wisecracks than there are bullets. And trust us, this movie has a whole lotta bullets. It’s bravado and muscular mischief and suggests Grabinski is one to watch. – DC

My Brother’s Killer

This documentary solves a murder case gone cold. My Brother’s Killer, directed by Rachel Mason, traces the 36 years since the brutal murder of 25-year-old William “Billy London” Arnold Newton in West Hollywood. 

This film captures the violence, trauma, and grief gay men experienced during the AIDS epidemic, as well as their resilience. Through archival material and dozens of interviews with those connected to the case, including her own mother, Mason uncovers shocking information.

“It was a terribly violent time and I think that’s another undocumented part of gay history,” Mason says. “Sadly, it is hard to always focus on the negativity and sadness, and the resilience of gay culture is the most amazing thing. In the sea of death, you also have this vibrancy, and I really wanted to showcase that. It doesn’t always have to be dark, the fight can be joyful in a strange way.”

Billy was an adult filmmaker, poet, and illustrative artist—he was also deeply loved by the people around him, a feeling evident throughout the documentary. This documentary is more than a true crime film, it showcases the struggle of representation and provides recognition and closure for those involved. – AH

Normal

Full disclosure: We were not able to actually see director Ben Wheatley and screenwriter Derek Kolstad’s new action movie starring Bob Odenkirk—the deceptively titled Normal—in Austin. However, we were able to speak with all three men, who have described the movie as a kind of inversion of High Noon. In that classic Western, Gary Cooper stood alone as a sheriff willing to face up bad men while all the people who loved him turned their backs in fear.

“It’s ultimately taking those themes, the sense and the appeal, and wrapping it around small-town Americana,” Kolstad observes about their new film. But it’s also doing so in a modern context with the America of today, setting the stage for an action spectacle apropos of the scribe behind John Wick.

For his part, director Wheatley appreciates that he has brought a British sensibility to the proceedings, saying, “An outsider’s perspective is always interesting. Not to say it’s better than worse from any other point-of-view, but I think there’s a long history of people coming from the outside to film the States and to see it with different eyes.” It also might be befitting of the neo-Western. While genre icon John Wayne famously detested High Noon back in the day, refusing to believe a small town wouldn’t support a good man in need, Normal’s viewers might be much more open to the idea. As Odenkirk quips, “He should meet some small towns.”

Over Your Dead Body

When it comes to filmmaking, the concept of “escalation” can be just as important as acting, scripting, or even turning the damn cameras on in the first place. Few movies at the 2026 SXSW Film Festival understand the importance of raising the stakes better than action comedy thriller Over Your Dead Body. 

Based on the 2021 Norwegian film The Trip and directed by The Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone, all Over Your Dead Body knows how to do is escalate. Things start relatively simple with husband and wife Dan and Lisa (Shrinking’s Jason Segel and Ready or Not’s Samara Weaving) repairing to a remote cabin upstate to save their dying marriage… and also to kill each other. Dan and Lisa’s murderous plans are complicated by a cascade of interlopers and extenuating circumstances, leading to mass amounts of blood, gore, and perhaps even some rekindled romance. 

Over Your Dead Body’s commitment to ratcheting absurdity means that its first act runs a bit dry. But once two prison escapees (Timothy Olyphant, Keith Jardine) and their guard conspirator (Juliette Lewis) enter the narrative, the movie really gets rolling and never looks back. And like any good partnership, Segel and Weaving excel in dabbling in the other’s home turf of horror and comedy, respectively. 

“I’m just so proud to have made a remake that I feel like has teeth,” Taccone says. “It’s dark, it’s fucked up, and it’s more gory than the original, weirdly. It has its own tone, and I just feel very proud that we could make something that I like equally to the original.” – AB

Pizza Movie

In a shameless throwback to the stoner comedies of the 2000s, Pizza Movie is the type of slouched and underachieving good time that is destined to best be seen in a crowded theater or even rowdier dorm room. Which isn’t to say it’s dumb. Writers-directors Nick Kocher and Brian McEllhaney take some boldly clever swings in their high-concept (ahem) where a couple of college screw-ups (Stranger Things’ Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone) indulge in an experimental drug they find in their dorm room. However, the thing has such potent magical properties, it not only gets them high but causes them to break the space-time continuum with time-loops and fourth-wall breaks. They’re like a pair of blitzed Punxsutawney co-eds.

The only cure? Pizza, of course, which is down in the lobby if they can get down there in time—or face severe consequences. It’s a deliberately, heavily-baked concept, which Kocher describes as based on a true story. “In college, we had the idea. Everyone’s ordered food when they’re not fully sober and it’s difficult.” You can say that again, dude. – DC

Power Ballad

It is said that success is the child of many fathers while failure is an orphan. But that doesn’t mean every papa gets the credit they deserve, particularly in fields as competitive (and lucrative) as songwriting. Such is the appealing conceit of John Carney’s latest bittersweet laugher that looks into the music business with as much affection as there is contempt. They, in fact, walk hand-in-hand when Paul Rudd’s washed up wedding singer Rick meets Nick Jonas’ former boy band heartthrob searching for reinvention, Danny. The two jam and jive during a joyous night over drinks in Ireland, including when Rick shows a few of the pieces he’s working on, particularly a poignant ballad that’s only missing a bridge.

Six months later, the song has it, as does Danny who’s introduced it to the world as an instant sensation—and as a piece of musical magic he wrote solo. A bit of a music industry “Book of Job,” where Rudd’s hurt and aggrieved Rick must deal with the eye-rolls and second-guessing of nearly everyone in his life, from his bandmates to even his wife and daughter. There’s a lot of humor in the scenario, but plenty of pathos as Rudd gives one of the finest performances of his career. He’s a man losing his sanity and his even-keel, to the point where he must travel from the Emerald Isle to the City of Angels. – DC

Pretty Lethal

The loftiness of chasing perfection, and the physical demand of what many consider the highest performing art, has always made ballet a compelling subject for filmmakers. Storytellers often wish to track the psychic or physiological toll of achieving révérence—or at least contrasting it with gonzo, blood-splattered spectacle. Pretty Lethal attempts both in a daffy B-crowdpleaser that essentially Die Hards five prima ballerinas when they’re trapped in an eastern European den of iniquity run by a vamping Uma Thurman. 

The movie gets a lot of mileage out of its balletic heroines being decidedly not John McClane (or Ana de Armas in a John Wick movie, for that matter). Instead, they nervously use their on pointe routine to “Waltz of the Flowers” for a blood-soaked defense in a bar involving knives, shattered wine bottles, and knives in the slippers. Says star Maddie Ziegler, “We sort of came up with a style we’re calling ballet-fu, which was really fun. Because we referenced if you put a bunch of feral cats in a box, that was what we were doing to survive. But I think we used our strengths to our advantage,” complete by combining the input of stunt coordinators and ballet choreographers. Grace is harmony. – DC

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

In an age of so-called “elevated” and sober-minded horror cinema, it is a blessing from Mr. Le Bail that we have Radio Silence ready to turn up the gore and fun. The filmmaking collective behind Ready or Not, Abigail, and the best Scream movies made in this century return to their own blood-red haunts and splash new buckets of crimson in the delightfully sinister Ready or Not 2. Like its predecessor, this is a grinning romp suffused with eat-the-rich gallows humor as we revisit the Bride in the splattered dress (Samara Weaving) mere moments after she parted brutally with her groom for good. (He was in the process of trying to sacrifice her to Satan. As apparently one does in country estates.)

Unfortunately for Grace, there are plenty of other Devil-worshipping billionaires out there. It turns out to be a blessing for the audience, though, as she inevitably slaughters them alongside sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) during a new hide-and-seek game at a country club that looks suspiciously like Mar-a-Lago. As director Gillett acknowledges, “All of the institutions that we engage with, if you follow them fall enough, you’re probably going to find some form of corruption.”

The movie doesn’t quite reach the same highs as the first movie since we know the punchline this time, but the climax at an elite Satanic altar is every bit as giddy as the combustible billionaires last time, and Samara Weaving still knows how to deliver a killing parting shot. – DC

The Saviors

Filmmakers don’t get to choose whether their films will be “timely” or not. Movies take a long time to make and time itself, as you might have noticed, has a tendency to Inexorably March On. Rarely has there ever been a better case study of that phenomenon than the unusually (and completely accidentally) timely comedy thriller The Saviors. 

Adam Scott and Danielle Deadwyler star as Sean and Kim, a couple in a failing marriage who look to supplement their income by renting their shed to Amir and Jahan – a brother and sister from an undisclosed Middle Eastern nation played by Theo Rossi and Nazanin Boniadi. While Amir and Jahan seem nice, they’re also suspiciously interested in the president of the United States’ whereabouts and appear to be building some sort of dangerous device. But this can’t be what Sean and Kim think it is, right? They’re not bigots and this isn’t a mediocre season of 24… right?

Due to a confluence of events like a pandemic, two Hollywood work stoppages, and the general improbability of getting a movie produced at all, The Saviors took 10 years to make from conception to premiere. And in that 10 years, the world shifted away from Obama-era progressive optimism to a more overt return to Islamophobia with the United States even entering war with Iran just two weeks before the film’s premiere.  

“You know, there was a period in those 10 years when I thought the world had changed a bit, and maybe we should focus on a different project,” director and co-writer Kevin Hamedani says. “And then the world changed again, and suddenly The Saviors is even more timely, unfortunately.”

The Saviors’ incidental resonance to current events only enhances what is already a compelling narrative. Scott and Deadwyler shine as two ostensibly progressive individuals who need answers but don’t want to seem like Bradley Whitford’s “I’d have voted for Obama a third time if I could” character in Get Out. Hamedani and the script deftly guide the audience through those choppy waters, always leaving enough breadcrumbs so that the viewer doesn’t fully feel like Bradley Whitford either. The end result is a nifty little thriller that feels like The ‘Burbs for the Airbnb age. – AB

Seekers of Infinite Love

Though Seekers of Infinite Love may one day be a cult comedy, right now it’s literally a comedy about a cult… but also about family

Hannah Einbinder (Hacks), John Reynolds (Search Party), and Griffin Gluck (American Vandal) star as a trio of siblings who must rescue their sister from the clutches of the Peoples Temple-esque the Seekers of Infinite Love. Helping them on their mission is ex cult member-turned-cult deprogrammer Rick (Justin Theroux) and his wardrobe of tactical vests. 

According to writer/director Victoria Strouse, Seekers’ cult angle emerged unexpectedly late in the writing process of the script, which was featured on 2008’s Black List.

“I’m utterly fascinated by siblings and I think some of the complexities in sibling relationships, [it] kind of ends up talking so much about all human relationships,” she says. “As I was working on it, I became really interested in cults, this idea of a secondary but corrupt family.”

That fascination with family shines through with Einbinder, Reynolds, and Gluck evoking a believably agitated sibling unit, if not a believably genetic one with their diverse mix of heights and hair colors. While the end result could have used a little more cult whackiness to fully live up to its comedic potential, it’s hard to be disappointed with time spent on a road trip to oblivion with four very funny actors. – AB 

See You When I See You

Before 2025’s SXSW title The Baltimorons, indie filmmaking titan Jay Duplass had not directed a movie since 2012’s The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, opting to help shepherd other storytellers’ visions alongside his brother and producing partner Mark Duplass. But when fellow producing family Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon brought the script for See You When I See You his way, he knew he had to get behind the camera once again. “It just felt big and scary and like I couldn’t say no,” he says. 

It’s easy to see why the project appealed to Duplass. Written by comedian Adam Cayton-Holland, and based on his memoir Tragedy Plus Time, See You When I See You is an intensely personal story about Cayton-Holland’s PTSD following the death of his sister by suicide. Cooper Raiff (director and star of Cha Cha Real Smooth) steps in as the film’s Cayton-Holland analogue, Aaron, and does marvelous work unpacking the young man’s confused journey through grief.

Outside of some creative visual choices representing Aaron’s struggle to reclaim happy memories of his sister, See You When I See You doesn’t have much new to say about the grieving process. Ultimately though, that’s a feature, not a bug, as the rhythms of pain should resonate with anyone who has experienced real tragedy. Even if those experiences involve significantly less Third-Eye Blind and Sum 41 than Aaron’s. – AB

Sender

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever been sent in the mail? The answer to that question can range from the mundane—a gardening hat you didn’t order—to the truly bizarre. Actor David Dastmalchian, for one, tells us he was mailed dirty underwear more than once by an anonymous…. fan? “It was accompanied by a really bizarre letter,” the actor grimaces.

That’s obviously immediately creepy, yet writer-director Russell Goldman’s Sender takes an initially more innocuous stance before turning the screws. And according to Goldman, this too is based on real-life. “[Folks will] send you cheap objects that are related, most likely, to your search history online and any cookies or data can take from what you’re looking like. They send it to your home so they can write reviews in your name that are five stars, so those products can then get a boost on the algorithms.”

Sender takes that conceit to its most ominous, Hitchockian extreme when Britt Lower’s Julia receives a mysterious package from an even more mysterious, and threatening, source. – DC

Sinner Supper Club

Described as a “gay mumblecore ghost story” directors of Sinner Supper Club, Daisy Rosato and Nora Kaye, deliver exactly what is promised. Shot on an iPhone within six days and rooted in improvisation, the film is a scrappy documentation of a NYC-based friend group on the fritz during a heat wave. 

Gathered in a small apartment for Genevieve’s (Genevieve Simon) “eviction funeral,” tensions arise amidst the group over things big and small. On top of navigating their shared-traumatic experience, the death of a best friend, nothing seems to go right — a melted ice cream cake, the power going out, and worst of all, an uninvited partner is brought to the gathering. The night culminates in an unexpected, yet restorative, paranormal experience. 

Sinner Supper Club explores the surrealness of grief from an intrinsically queer perspective. It delivers comedic beats and moments of grief with the fluidity of a high-budget film. While there are moments of hesitance from the actors, the ensemble cast delivers a performance where you feel dropped in the middle of their hangout. – AH

They Will Kill You

The idea for They Will Kill You blossomed after director Kirill Sokolov stayed in an eerie hotel that he believed to be inhabited by a cult of old women. The fictionalized and much gorier version stars Zazie Beetz as the new housekeeper at a decadent hotel with a history of mysterious disappearances. As Sokolov brings her violent journey through the mysterious building to the big screen, the company explores countless genres, from mystery to slapstick to fantasy. 

“Kirill was always reminding us that yes, there’s action, and yes, there’s comedy, but also, at least for me, the most important thing was the truth at the moment,” Myha’la, who plays Beetz’s sister, says. “Then, if it feels truthful and honest and real to me and us in this moment, the comedy is going to come in the edit.” 

The highlight of the movie is the performances from actors like Patricia Arquette, Tom Felton, Heather Graham, and the aforementioned sister duo. They expertly balance multiple styles and tropes, giving the movie an edge in an arguably oversaturated genre.  

“It is genre-defying because it is a love story about two sisters, and that’s really at the core of everything, and then you mix in the brilliant Kung Fu and gore and martial arts and heroism,” Felton says. “It’s a unique blend. I don’t think a film has ever been made quite like this.” – SR 

Time and Water

“The future we were warned about is no longer distant, it is here.” This is the message that Oscar-nominated director Sara Dosa shares in her newest documentary Time and Water. Through archival material and the writings of Icelandic author, Andri Snær Magnason, Dosa puts together an expansive story focused on generational memory and humanity’s relationship with nature. 

Centered on Magnason’s own family ties, Time and Water captures the vast existence of Icelandic glaciers and the tremendous loss felt by the author as he witnesses the disappearance of these titans, and the passing of his grandparents. The audience is transported through the passing of time and experiences the indelible impression humans make on the world and people around them.  

“There is something radical about love, especially in a time that is so polarizing,” Dosa says. “Wherever we can center love and joy amid the doom and the apocalyptic stories abound, I think it could inspire hope…I think it can give a sense of a light in the dark to keep people working toward the change that we so badly need.” 

Time and Water is a stark wake-up call, not only to protect the planet we call home, but to cherish our time with loved ones. The future is now, and Dosa captures the course we took to get here. – AH

Wishful Thinking

It sometimes feels impossible to be happy—even with someone you love—when there’s so much bad news in the world. So imagine the pressure Julia and Charlie (Maya Hawke and Lewis Pullman) are under in Wishful Thinking, a supremely clever and wholesome romantic comedy where the fate of Portland, Oregon, if not the world, rests on the straining romance of two young people at a crossroads in their life. As it slowly dawns on them, when things are good in their domestic life, Julia is suddenly up for a promotion at work, and Charlie’s crypto investments are skyrocketing. When they’re unhappy with each other, literal earthquakes can occur.

It’s a shrewd use of magical realism to entertain wish fulfillment—like literally getting rich off crypto after a particularly sexy date night—but also comment on the pressures we put on each other in the modern world, particularly for those who are as socially entangled and plugged in as the film’s Gen-Z antiheroes. It’s an indie rom-com about the challenge of early adult romances, complete with a big swing ending. But it finds an innovative way to engage these elements, especially when Hawke and Pullman are simpatico—and perhaps even more so when they’re not. – DC

Woodstockers

We were delighted to welcome film and TV mainstay Corbin Bernsen back to the Den of Geek Studio at SXSW to chat about his indie TV pilot, Woodstockers. This time, Bernsen–who is the showrunner, writer, and star– was joined by his son, Oliver, who directed the pilot episode (he also had a feature-length directorial debut, Bagworm, play at the festival).

The delightfully funny dramedy puts the audience in the headspace of an aging hippie confronting life, death, and a bygone era and its legacy set against scenic upstate New York. Our conversation was introspective as the Bernsen’s grappled with deep conversations on set, Corbin’s own career journey, which launched during that period in 1967, and their excitement for independent filmmaking in the television space. Their commitment to the form paid off: Woodstockers took home an Audience award. Now that’s Flower Power. – Chris Longo

Television

Are We Still Married?

Indie TV pilot Are We Still Married? stars Dustin Milligan as Jack, a husband who has been turned into a vampire via a bite from a mysterious bat, and Taylor Misiak as Laura, his wife who isn’t sure whether we should let him back in the house. While that is undoubtedly a bold genre concept, the inspiration for the story came from a real life experience for writer/director Kit Steinkellner (who also created the Facebook Watch series Sorry For Your Loss).

“My husband did get bit by a bat,” she tells Den of Geek. “It was that kind of crazy thing that doesn’t happen except when it does. He got a rabies shot and was OK. I don’t know how you process trauma in your marriage but comedic bits are our go-to. So we just started cracking vampire jokes. At a certain point, he was like ‘but if I were a vampire, you would let me back in the house, right?’ I paused and he didn’t like that pause.”

Through the safety of her closed kitchen window, Laura peppers Jack with questions about vampirism that he doesn’t have the answers to (the bat didn’t exactly explain all the rules of this whole thing). Steinkellner and the actors make beautiful work of the premise, both having fun with the genre silliness of it all while also delving into the pathos of a loving marriage interrupted by a truly unforeseeable calamity. Coming in at just 15 minutes long, Are We Still Married? serves as a compelling proof of concept for whatever direction, and medium, Steinkellner wants to take the story from here.

“I did write a feature inspired by this that was on this past year’s Blacklist. At the same time, in having this conversation with South by, a part of the independent pilot requirement is to submit a series bible. I’ve actually not done this with other ideas before but I have pretty thoroughly explored both options. Ultimately I just want to keep telling this story.” – AB

The Audacity

Have you ever wondered where the wunderkind techbros of Silicon Valley get the audacity? Thankfully so has Jonathan Glatzer, a former writer on Succession and Better Call Saul and now the creator and showrunner of AMC’s fittingly named The Audacity. 

“For years, I thought of audacity as a kind of superpower that we all have, but few of us actually employ because it involves crashing through norms of behavior. Most of us are not bulls in China shops, but in Silicon Valley, it is kind of regarded as an attribute. There’s a lot of broken dishes around there, but that’s what they like: move fast and break things,” he says.

Through its first three episodes, The Audacity doesn’t move fast, but it does break some things. Billy Magnussen (a compelling character actor probably best known for Game Night and Made For Love) steps into the megalomaniacal shoes of Hypergnosis CEO Duncan Park. Eager to prove that he’s much more than the product of some well-timed good luck, Duncan leverages his relationship with his therapist Joanne Felder to gain some (flagrantly illegal) advantages over his competition. 

The Audacity excels as a slice of life look at the excesses (and yes, audacity) of Silicon Valley’s elite in the rapidly expanding AI era. While its early episodes come off as more of a vibe in search of a story, the level of talent both behind and in front of the camera suggests that it has plenty of room to grow. – AB

The Comeback Season 3

Since The Comeback first premiered in 2005, Valerie Cherish has always returned to TV when it needs her the most. The first season of the HBO comedy found the aging sitcom diva played by Lisa Kudrow trying to navigate the brave new world of reality TV, recording her comeback as Aunt Sassy on new sitcom “Room and Bored.” In 2014’s season 2, Valerie attempted to get in on the Bravo-fication of the medium by pitching a pilot to Andy Cohen. Now, with The Comeback’s third and final season, Valerie is set to tackle television’s gravest challenge yet: artificial intelligence.

“[The Comeback] began with what everyone thought was the first extinction event [of TV], which was reality TV, eliminating scripted television for the more economical – no rules, no unions,” Kudrow says. “Happily that wasn’t the end. [Co-creator Michael Patrick King and I] were having lunch and he was like ‘What about this: Valerie is finally offered the lead in a multi-camera sitcom but it’s written about AI.’”

The Comeback season 3’s eight episodes present yet another comedic masterclass of industry satire and character-building. There’s never been someone quite like Valerie Cherish on television and there is unlikely to be ever again. The fading superstar is desperate for fame yet uniquely ill-equipped to handle it, spending much of her adult life flourishing in front of sitcom studio multicams while putting her foot in her mouth in front of documentary single cams. 

The Comeback’s satire is so subtle as to be barely visible. Really it’s the story of a singular character who refuses to let her story end regardless of how many times the industry tries to close the book… and all the humiliation she endures with a grin because of it. Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King give Valerie Cherish the ending she so richly deserves, but we’ll miss her all the same. – AB

The Dark Wizard

The history of rock climbing is rife with larger-than-life characters and adventure sport trailblazers, but few loom as large as Dean Potter. A climber, high-liner, BASE jumper and all around Yosemite Valley Renaissance man, Potter set speed records and free soloed daunting walls at an unprecedented caliber for the duration of his career. Now, Peter Mortimer and Nick Rosen – documentary filmmakers and Potter’s old friends – are bringing his story to HBO Max with their new docuseries, “The Dark Wizard.” 

“His aura and myth dominated the sport, both because he was pioneering all these crazy things … but there was also a much broader story there, the behind the scenes and what was going on in his personal world that was really compelling that no one had really heard about,” Rosen says. 

“The Dark Wizard” not only details Potter’s Herculean feats and the impact he had on the climbing community, but also his mental health journey that took place behind the closed doors of an alpha facade. 

“It’s unbelievable seeing all these Olympic athletes talk about their mental health and the struggles,” Mortimer says. “That just was not happening back in the time.” 

The only documentation of Potter’s internal dialogues were in his journals, which his sister donated to the filmmaking duo so they could platform the realities of his life. Using stylistic images and animations from these diaries, alongside interviews with Potter and his inner circle, Mortimer and Rosen crafted a chilling recapitulation of the climber’s life. – SR 

Margo’s Got Money Troubles

Margo’s got money troubles, sure. But she’s also got some big expectations to meet. The Apple TV dramedy entered the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival as the undisputed TV headliner, thanks to the involvement of two prestige studios (A24 and the aforementioned Apple TV), a legendary TV showrunner (David E. Kelley), and a high-powered cast that would fit right in at this year’s Oscars ceremony (Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman, Nicole Kidman, and more). Still, it’s one thing to have a lot of expensive toys; it’s another thing entirely to know how to play with them. Thankfully, Margo’s Got Money Troubles puts forward an eight-episode experience well worthy of its creative firepower. 

Based on a novel of the same name by Rufi Thorpe, Margo stars Elle Fanning as the titular young woman with money problems due to an unexpected pregnancy following a tryst with her douchey literature professor. Anticipating little help from her ex-Hooters waitress mother (Pfeiffer) or professional wrestler estranged father (Offerman), Margo gets creative (and sometimes nekkid) to pay the bills. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is Juno for the OnlyFans generation. It’s also the rare “prestige” episodic experience that doesn’t feel like a two-hour movie script that got out of hand. That’s all thanks to a preposterously charming lead performance from Fanning and her equally likable supporting cast. – AB

The post Everything We Saw at SXSW 2026: I Love Boosters, Wishful Thinking, The Comeback, and More appeared first on Den of Geek.

I’m not sure when I first heard this quote, but it’s something that has stayed with me over the years. How do you create services for situations you can’t imagine? Or design products that work on devices yet to be invented?

Flash, Photoshop, and responsive design

When I first started designing websites, my go-to software was Photoshop. I created a 960px canvas and set about creating a layout that I would later drop content in. The development phase was about attaining pixel-perfect accuracy using fixed widths, fixed heights, and absolute positioning.

Ethan Marcotte’s talk at An Event Apart and subsequent article “Responsive Web Design” in A List Apart in 2010 changed all this. I was sold on responsive design as soon as I heard about it, but I was also terrified. The pixel-perfect designs full of magic numbers that I had previously prided myself on producing were no longer good enough.

The fear wasn’t helped by my first experience with responsive design. My first project was to take an existing fixed-width website and make it responsive. What I learned the hard way was that you can’t just add responsiveness at the end of a project. To create fluid layouts, you need to plan throughout the design phase.

A new way to design

Designing responsive or fluid sites has always been about removing limitations, producing content that can be viewed on any device. It relies on the use of percentage-based layouts, which I initially achieved with native CSS and utility classes:

.column-span-6 {
  width: 49%;
  float: left;
  margin-right: 0.5%;
  margin-left: 0.5%;
}


.column-span-4 {
  width: 32%;
  float: left;
  margin-right: 0.5%;
  margin-left: 0.5%;
}

.column-span-3 {
  width: 24%;
  float: left;
  margin-right: 0.5%;
  margin-left: 0.5%;
}

Then with Sass so I could take advantage of @includes to re-use repeated blocks of code and move back to more semantic markup:

.logo {
  @include colSpan(6);
}

.search {
  @include colSpan(3);
}

.social-share {
  @include colSpan(3);
}

Media queries

The second ingredient for responsive design is media queries. Without them, content would shrink to fit the available space regardless of whether that content remained readable (The exact opposite problem occurred with the introduction of a mobile-first approach).

Media queries prevented this by allowing us to add breakpoints where the design could adapt. Like most people, I started out with three breakpoints: one for desktop, one for tablets, and one for mobile. Over the years, I added more and more for phablets, wide screens, and so on. 

For years, I happily worked this way and improved both my design and front-end skills in the process. The only problem I encountered was making changes to content, since with our Sass grid system in place, there was no way for the site owners to add content without amending the markup—something a small business owner might struggle with. This is because each row in the grid was defined using a div as a container. Adding content meant creating new row markup, which requires a level of HTML knowledge.

Row markup was a staple of early responsive design, present in all the widely used frameworks like Bootstrap and Skeleton.

  
1 of 7
  
2 of 7
  
3 of 7



  
4 of 7
  
5 of 7
  
6 of 7



  
7 of 7

Another problem arose as I moved from a design agency building websites for small- to medium-sized businesses, to larger in-house teams where I worked across a suite of related sites. In those roles I started to work much more with reusable components. 

Our reliance on media queries resulted in components that were tied to common viewport sizes. If the goal of component libraries is reuse, then this is a real problem because you can only use these components if the devices you’re designing for correspond to the viewport sizes used in the pattern library—in the process not really hitting that “devices that don’t yet exist”  goal.

Then there’s the problem of space. Media queries allow components to adapt based on the viewport size, but what if I put a component into a sidebar, like in the figure below?

Container queries: our savior or a false dawn?

Container queries have long been touted as an improvement upon media queries, but at the time of writing are unsupported in most browsers. There are JavaScript workarounds, but they can create dependency and compatibility issues. The basic theory underlying container queries is that elements should change based on the size of their parent container and not the viewport width, as seen in the following illustrations.

One of the biggest arguments in favor of container queries is that they help us create components or design patterns that are truly reusable because they can be picked up and placed anywhere in a layout. This is an important step in moving toward a form of component-based design that works at any size on any device.

In other words, responsive components to replace responsive layouts.

Container queries will help us move from designing pages that respond to the browser or device size to designing components that can be placed in a sidebar or in the main content, and respond accordingly.

My concern is that we are still using layout to determine when a design needs to adapt. This approach will always be restrictive, as we will still need pre-defined breakpoints. For this reason, my main question with container queries is, How would we decide when to change the CSS used by a component? 

A component library removed from context and real content is probably not the best place for that decision. 

As the diagrams below illustrate, we can use container queries to create designs for specific container widths, but what if I want to change the design based on the image size or ratio?

In this example, the dimensions of the container are not what should dictate the design; rather, the image is.

It’s hard to say for sure whether container queries will be a success story until we have solid cross-browser support for them. Responsive component libraries would definitely evolve how we design and would improve the possibilities for reuse and design at scale. But maybe we will always need to adjust these components to suit our content.

CSS is changing

Whilst the container query debate rumbles on, there have been numerous advances in CSS that change the way we think about design. The days of fixed-width elements measured in pixels and floated div elements used to cobble layouts together are long gone, consigned to history along with table layouts. Flexbox and CSS Grid have revolutionized layouts for the web. We can now create elements that wrap onto new rows when they run out of space, not when the device changes.

.wrapper {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, 450px);
  gap: 10px;
}

The repeat() function paired with auto-fit or auto-fill allows us to specify how much space each column should use while leaving it up to the browser to decide when to spill the columns onto a new line. Similar things can be achieved with Flexbox, as elements can wrap over multiple rows and “flex” to fill available space. 

.wrapper {
  display: flex;
  flex-wrap: wrap;
  justify-content: space-between;
}

.child {
  flex-basis: 32%;
  margin-bottom: 20px;
}

The biggest benefit of all this is you don’t need to wrap elements in container rows. Without rows, content isn’t tied to page markup in quite the same way, allowing for removals or additions of content without additional development.

This is a big step forward when it comes to creating designs that allow for evolving content, but the real game changer for flexible designs is CSS Subgrid. 

Remember the days of crafting perfectly aligned interfaces, only for the customer to add an unbelievably long header almost as soon as they’re given CMS access, like the illustration below?

Subgrid allows elements to respond to adjustments in their own content and in the content of sibling elements, helping us create designs more resilient to change.

.wrapper {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(150px, 1fr));
     grid-template-rows: auto 1fr auto;
  gap: 10px;
}

.sub-grid {
  display: grid;
  grid-row: span 3;
  grid-template-rows: subgrid; /* sets rows to parent grid */
}

CSS Grid allows us to separate layout and content, thereby enabling flexible designs. Meanwhile, Subgrid allows us to create designs that can adapt in order to suit morphing content. Subgrid at the time of writing is only supported in Firefox but the above code can be implemented behind an @supports feature query. 

Intrinsic layouts 

I’d be remiss not to mention intrinsic layouts, the term created by Jen Simmons to describe a mixture of new and old CSS features used to create layouts that respond to available space. 

Responsive layouts have flexible columns using percentages. Intrinsic layouts, on the other hand, use the fr unit to create flexible columns that won’t ever shrink so much that they render the content illegible.

fr units is a way to say I want you to distribute the extra space in this way, but…don’t ever make it smaller than the content that’s inside of it.

—Jen Simmons, “Designing Intrinsic Layouts”

Intrinsic layouts can also utilize a mixture of fixed and flexible units, allowing the content to dictate the space it takes up.

What makes intrinsic design stand out is that it not only creates designs that can withstand future devices but also helps scale design without losing flexibility. Components and patterns can be lifted and reused without the prerequisite of having the same breakpoints or the same amount of content as in the previous implementation. 

We can now create designs that adapt to the space they have, the content within them, and the content around them. With an intrinsic approach, we can construct responsive components without depending on container queries.

Another 2010 moment?

This intrinsic approach should in my view be every bit as groundbreaking as responsive web design was ten years ago. For me, it’s another “everything changed” moment. 

But it doesn’t seem to be moving quite as fast; I haven’t yet had that same career-changing moment I had with responsive design, despite the widely shared and brilliant talk that brought it to my attention. 

One reason for that could be that I now work in a large organization, which is quite different from the design agency role I had in 2010. In my agency days, every new project was a clean slate, a chance to try something new. Nowadays, projects use existing tools and frameworks and are often improvements to existing websites with an existing codebase. 

Another could be that I feel more prepared for change now. In 2010 I was new to design in general; the shift was frightening and required a lot of learning. Also, an intrinsic approach isn’t exactly all-new; it’s about using existing skills and existing CSS knowledge in a different way. 

You can’t framework your way out of a content problem

Another reason for the slightly slower adoption of intrinsic design could be the lack of quick-fix framework solutions available to kick-start the change. 

Responsive grid systems were all over the place ten years ago. With a framework like Bootstrap or Skeleton, you had a responsive design template at your fingertips.

Intrinsic design and frameworks do not go hand in hand quite so well because the benefit of having a selection of units is a hindrance when it comes to creating layout templates. The beauty of intrinsic design is combining different units and experimenting with techniques to get the best for your content.

And then there are design tools. We probably all, at some point in our careers, used Photoshop templates for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices to drop designs in and show how the site would look at all three stages.

How do you do that now, with each component responding to content and layouts flexing as and when they need to? This type of design must happen in the browser, which personally I’m a big fan of. 

The debate about “whether designers should code” is another that has rumbled on for years. When designing a digital product, we should, at the very least, design for a best- and worst-case scenario when it comes to content. To do this in a graphics-based software package is far from ideal. In code, we can add longer sentences, more radio buttons, and extra tabs, and watch in real time as the design adapts. Does it still work? Is the design too reliant on the current content?

Personally, I look forward to the day intrinsic design is the standard for design, when a design component can be truly flexible and adapt to both its space and content with no reliance on device or container dimensions.

Content first 

Content is not constant. After all, to design for the unknown or unexpected we need to account for content changes like our earlier Subgrid card example that allowed the cards to respond to adjustments to their own content and the content of sibling elements.

Thankfully, there’s more to CSS than layout, and plenty of properties and values can help us put content first. Subgrid and pseudo-elements like ::first-line and ::first-letter help to separate design from markup so we can create designs that allow for changes.

Instead of old markup hacks like this—

  First line of text with different styling...

—we can target content based on where it appears.

.element::first-line {
  font-size: 1.4em;
}

.element::first-letter {
  color: red;
}

Much bigger additions to CSS include logical properties, which change the way we construct designs using logical dimensions (start and end) instead of physical ones (left and right), something CSS Grid also does with functions like min(), max(), and clamp().

This flexibility allows for directional changes according to content, a common requirement when we need to present content in multiple languages. In the past, this was often achieved with Sass mixins but was often limited to switching from left-to-right to right-to-left orientation.

In the Sass version, directional variables need to be set.

$direction: rtl;
$opposite-direction: ltr;

$start-direction: right;
$end-direction: left;

These variables can be used as values—

body {
  direction: $direction;
  text-align: $start-direction;
}

—or as properties.

margin-#{$end-direction}: 10px;
padding-#{$start-direction}: 10px;

However, now we have native logical properties, removing the reliance on both Sass (or a similar tool) and pre-planning that necessitated using variables throughout a codebase. These properties also start to break apart the tight coupling between a design and strict physical dimensions, creating more flexibility for changes in language and in direction.

margin-block-end: 10px;
padding-block-start: 10px;

There are also native start and end values for properties like text-align, which means we can replace text-align: right with text-align: start.

Like the earlier examples, these properties help to build out designs that aren’t constrained to one language; the design will reflect the content’s needs.

Fixed and fluid 

We briefly covered the power of combining fixed widths with fluid widths with intrinsic layouts. The min() and max() functions are a similar concept, allowing you to specify a fixed value with a flexible alternative. 

For min() this means setting a fluid minimum value and a maximum fixed value.

.element {
  width: min(50%, 300px);
}

The element in the figure above will be 50% of its container as long as the element’s width doesn’t exceed 300px.

For max() we can set a flexible max value and a minimum fixed value.

.element {
  width: max(50%, 300px);
}

Now the element will be 50% of its container as long as the element’s width is at least 300px. This means we can set limits but allow content to react to the available space. 

The clamp() function builds on this by allowing us to set a preferred value with a third parameter. Now we can allow the element to shrink or grow if it needs to without getting to a point where it becomes unusable.

.element {
  width: clamp(300px, 50%, 600px);
}

This time, the element’s width will be 50% (the preferred value) of its container but never less than 300px and never more than 600px.

With these techniques, we have a content-first approach to responsive design. We can separate content from markup, meaning the changes users make will not affect the design. We can start to future-proof designs by planning for unexpected changes in language or direction. And we can increase flexibility by setting desired dimensions alongside flexible alternatives, allowing for more or less content to be displayed correctly.

Situation first

Thanks to what we’ve discussed so far, we can cover device flexibility by changing our approach, designing around content and space instead of catering to devices. But what about that last bit of Jeffrey Zeldman’s quote, “…situations you haven’t imagined”?

It’s a very different thing to design for someone seated at a desktop computer as opposed to someone using a mobile phone and moving through a crowded street in glaring sunshine. Situations and environments are hard to plan for or predict because they change as people react to their own unique challenges and tasks.

This is why choice is so important. One size never fits all, so we need to design for multiple scenarios to create equal experiences for all our users.

Thankfully, there is a lot we can do to provide choice.

Responsible design 

“There are parts of the world where mobile data is prohibitively expensive, and where there is little or no broadband infrastructure.”

“I Used the Web for a Day on a 50 MB Budget”

Chris Ashton

One of the biggest assumptions we make is that people interacting with our designs have a good wifi connection and a wide screen monitor. But in the real world, our users may be commuters traveling on trains or other forms of transport using smaller mobile devices that can experience drops in connectivity. There is nothing more frustrating than a web page that won’t load, but there are ways we can help users use less data or deal with sporadic connectivity.

The srcset attribute allows the browser to decide which image to serve. This means we can create smaller ‘cropped’ images to display on mobile devices in turn using less bandwidth and less data.

The preload attribute can also help us to think about how and when media is downloaded. It can be used to tell a browser about any critical assets that need to be downloaded with high priority, improving perceived performance and the user experience. 

There’s also native lazy loading, which indicates assets that should only be downloaded when they are needed.

With srcset, preload, and lazy loading, we can start to tailor a user’s experience based on the situation they find themselves in. What none of this does, however, is allow the user themselves to decide what they want downloaded, as the decision is usually the browser’s to make. 

So how can we put users in control?

The return of media queries 

Media queries have always been about much more than device sizes. They allow content to adapt to different situations, with screen size being just one of them.

We’ve long been able to check for media types like print and speech and features such as hover, resolution, and color. These checks allow us to provide options that suit more than one scenario; it’s less about one-size-fits-all and more about serving adaptable content. 

As of this writing, the Media Queries Level 5 spec is still under development. It introduces some really exciting queries that in the future will help us design for multiple other unexpected situations.

For example, there’s a light-level feature that allows you to modify styles if a user is in sunlight or darkness. Paired with custom properties, these features allow us to quickly create designs or themes for specific environments.

@media (light-level: normal) {
  --background-color: #fff;
  --text-color: #0b0c0c;  
}

@media (light-level: dim) {
  --background-color: #efd226;
  --text-color: #0b0c0c;
}

Another key feature of the Level 5 spec is personalization. Instead of creating designs that are the same for everyone, users can choose what works for them. This is achieved by using features like prefers-reduced-data, prefers-color-scheme, and prefers-reduced-motion, the latter two of which already enjoy broad browser support. These features tap into preferences set via the operating system or browser so people don’t have to spend time making each site they visit more usable. 

Media queries like this go beyond choices made by a browser to grant more control to the user.

Expect the unexpected

In the end, the one thing we should always expect is for things to change. Devices in particular change faster than we can keep up, with foldable screens already on the market.

We can’t design the same way we have for this ever-changing landscape, but we can design for content. By putting content first and allowing that content to adapt to whatever space surrounds it, we can create more robust, flexible designs that increase the longevity of our products. 

A lot of the CSS discussed here is about moving away from layouts and putting content at the heart of design. From responsive components to fixed and fluid units, there is so much more we can do to take a more intrinsic approach. Even better, we can test these techniques during the design phase by designing in-browser and watching how our designs adapt in real-time.

When it comes to unexpected situations, we need to make sure our products are usable when people need them, whenever and wherever that might be. We can move closer to achieving this by involving users in our design decisions, by creating choice via browsers, and by giving control to our users with user-preference-based media queries. 

Good design for the unexpected should allow for change, provide choice, and give control to those we serve: our users themselves.

We’ve been having conversations for thousands of years. Whether to convey information, conduct transactions, or simply to check in on one another, people have yammered away, chattering and gesticulating, through spoken conversation for countless generations. Only in the last few millennia have we begun to commit our conversations to writing, and only in the last few decades have we begun to outsource them to the computer, a machine that shows much more affinity for written correspondence than for the slangy vagaries of spoken language.

Computers have trouble because between spoken and written language, speech is more primordial. To have successful conversations with us, machines must grapple with the messiness of human speech: the disfluencies and pauses, the gestures and body language, and the variations in word choice and spoken dialect that can stymie even the most carefully crafted human-computer interaction. In the human-to-human scenario, spoken language also has the privilege of face-to-face contact, where we can readily interpret nonverbal social cues.

In contrast, written language immediately concretizes as we commit it to record and retains usages long after they become obsolete in spoken communication (the salutation “To whom it may concern,” for example), generating its own fossil record of outdated terms and phrases. Because it tends to be more consistent, polished, and formal, written text is fundamentally much easier for machines to parse and understand.

Spoken language has no such luxury. Besides the nonverbal cues that decorate conversations with emphasis and emotional context, there are also verbal cues and vocal behaviors that modulate conversation in nuanced ways: how something is said, not what. Whether rapid-fire, low-pitched, or high-decibel, whether sarcastic, stilted, or sighing, our spoken language conveys much more than the written word could ever muster. So when it comes to voice interfaces—the machines we conduct spoken conversations with—we face exciting challenges as designers and content strategists.

Voice Interactions

We interact with voice interfaces for a variety of reasons, but according to Michael McTear, Zoraida Callejas, and David Griol in The Conversational Interface, those motivations by and large mirror the reasons we initiate conversations with other people, too (). Generally, we start up a conversation because:

• we need something done (such as a transaction),
• we want to know something (information of some sort), or
• we are social beings and want someone to talk to (conversation for conversation’s sake).

These three categories—which I call transactional, informational, and prosocial—also characterize essentially every voice interaction: a single conversation from beginning to end that realizes some outcome for the user, starting with the voice interface’s first greeting and ending with the user exiting the interface. Note here that a conversation in our human sense—a chat between people that leads to some result and lasts an arbitrary length of time—could encompass multiple transactional, informational, and prosocial voice interactions in succession. In other words, a voice interaction is a conversation, but a conversation is not necessarily a single voice interaction.

Purely prosocial conversations are more gimmicky than captivating in most voice interfaces, because machines don’t yet have the capacity to really want to know how we’re doing and to do the sort of glad-handing humans crave. There’s also ongoing debate as to whether users actually prefer the sort of organic human conversation that begins with a prosocial voice interaction and shifts seamlessly into other types. In fact, in Voice User Interface Design, Michael Cohen, James Giangola, and Jennifer Balogh recommend sticking to users’ expectations by mimicking how they interact with other voice interfaces rather than trying too hard to be human—potentially alienating them in the process ().

That leaves two genres of conversations we can have with one another that a voice interface can easily have with us, too: a transactional voice interaction realizing some outcome (“buy iced tea”) and an informational voice interaction teaching us something new (“discuss a musical”).

Transactional voice interactions

Unless you’re tapping buttons on a food delivery app, you’re generally having a conversation—and therefore a voice interaction—when you order a Hawaiian pizza with extra pineapple. Even when we walk up to the counter and place an order, the conversation quickly pivots from an initial smattering of neighborly small talk to the real mission at hand: ordering a pizza (generously topped with pineapple, as it should be).

Alison: Hey, how’s it going?

Burhan: Hi, welcome to Crust Deluxe! It’s cold out there. How can I help you?

Alison: Can I get a Hawaiian pizza with extra pineapple?

Burhan: Sure, what size?

Alison: Large.

Burhan: Anything else?

Alison: No thanks, that’s it.

Burhan: Something to drink?

Alison: I’ll have a bottle of Coke.

Burhan: You got it. That’ll be $13.55 and about fifteen minutes.

Each progressive disclosure in this transactional conversation reveals more and more of the desired outcome of the transaction: a service rendered or a product delivered. Transactional conversations have certain key traits: they’re direct, to the point, and economical. They quickly dispense with pleasantries.

Informational voice interactions

Meanwhile, some conversations are primarily about obtaining information. Though Alison might visit Crust Deluxe with the sole purpose of placing an order, she might not actually want to walk out with a pizza at all. She might be just as interested in whether they serve halal or kosher dishes, gluten-free options, or something else. Here, though we again have a prosocial mini-conversation at the beginning to establish politeness, we’re after much more.

Alison: Hey, how’s it going?

Burhan: Hi, welcome to Crust Deluxe! It’s cold out there. How can I help you?

Alison: Can I ask a few questions?

Burhan: Of course! Go right ahead.

Alison: Do you have any halal options on the menu?

Burhan: Absolutely! We can make any pie halal by request. We also have lots of vegetarian, ovo-lacto, and vegan options. Are you thinking about any other dietary restrictions?

Alison: What about gluten-free pizzas?

Burhan: We can definitely do a gluten-free crust for you, no problem, for both our deep-dish and thin-crust pizzas. Anything else I can answer for you?

Alison: That’s it for now. Good to know. Thanks!

Burhan: Anytime, come back soon!

This is a very different dialogue. Here, the goal is to get a certain set of facts. Informational conversations are investigative quests for the truth—research expeditions to gather data, news, or facts. Voice interactions that are informational might be more long-winded than transactional conversations by necessity. Responses tend to be lengthier, more informative, and carefully communicated so the customer understands the key takeaways.

Voice Interfaces

At their core, voice interfaces employ speech to support users in reaching their goals. But simply because an interface has a voice component doesn’t mean that every user interaction with it is mediated through voice. Because multimodal voice interfaces can lean on visual components like screens as crutches, we’re most concerned in this book with pure voice interfaces, which depend entirely on spoken conversation, lack any visual component whatsoever, and are therefore much more nuanced and challenging to tackle.

Though voice interfaces have long been integral to the imagined future of humanity in science fiction, only recently have those lofty visions become fully realized in genuine voice interfaces.

Interactive voice response (IVR) systems

Though written conversational interfaces have been fixtures of computing for many decades, voice interfaces first emerged in the early 1990s with text-to-speech (TTS) dictation programs that recited written text aloud, as well as speech-enabled in-car systems that gave directions to a user-provided address. With the advent of interactive voice response (IVR) systems, intended as an alternative to overburdened customer service representatives, we became acquainted with the first true voice interfaces that engaged in authentic conversation.

IVR systems allowed organizations to reduce their reliance on call centers but soon became notorious for their clunkiness. Commonplace in the corporate world, these systems were primarily designed as metaphorical switchboards to guide customers to a real phone agent (“Say Reservations to book a flight or check an itinerary”); chances are you will enter a conversation with one when you call an airline or hotel conglomerate. Despite their functional issues and users’ frustration with their inability to speak to an actual human right away, IVR systems proliferated in the early 1990s across a variety of industries (, PDF).

While IVR systems are great for highly repetitive, monotonous conversations that generally don’t veer from a single format, they have a reputation for less scintillating conversation than we’re used to in real life (or even in science fiction).

Screen readers

Parallel to the evolution of IVR systems was the invention of the screen reader, a tool that transcribes visual content into synthesized speech. For Blind or visually impaired website users, it’s the predominant method of interacting with text, multimedia, or form elements. Screen readers represent perhaps the closest equivalent we have today to an out-of-the-box implementation of content delivered through voice.

Among the first screen readers known by that moniker was the Screen Reader for the BBC Micro and NEEC Portable developed by the Research Centre for the Education of the Visually Handicapped (RCEVH) at the University of Birmingham in 1986 (). That same year, Jim Thatcher created the first IBM Screen Reader for text-based computers, later recreated for computers with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) ().

With the rapid growth of the web in the 1990s, the demand for accessible tools for websites exploded. Thanks to the introduction of semantic HTML and especially ARIA roles beginning in 2008, screen readers started facilitating speedy interactions with web pages that ostensibly allow disabled users to traverse the page as an aural and temporal space rather than a visual and physical one. In other words, screen readers for the web “provide mechanisms that translate visual design constructs—proximity, proportion, etc.—into useful information,” writes Aaron Gustafson in A List Apart. “At least they do when documents are authored thoughtfully” ().

Though deeply instructive for voice interface designers, there’s one significant problem with screen readers: they’re difficult to use and unremittingly verbose. The visual structures of websites and web navigation don’t translate well to screen readers, sometimes resulting in unwieldy pronouncements that name every manipulable HTML element and announce every formatting change. For many screen reader users, working with web-based interfaces exacts a cognitive toll.

In Wired, accessibility advocate and voice engineer Chris Maury considers why the screen reader experience is ill-suited to users relying on voice:

From the beginning, I hated the way that Screen Readers work. Why are they designed the way they are? It makes no sense to present information visually and then, and only then, translate that into audio. All of the time and energy that goes into creating the perfect user experience for an app is wasted, or even worse, adversely impacting the experience for blind users. ()

In many cases, well-designed voice interfaces can speed users to their destination better than long-winded screen reader monologues. After all, visual interface users have the benefit of darting around the viewport freely to find information, ignoring areas irrelevant to them. Blind users, meanwhile, are obligated to listen to every utterance synthesized into speech and therefore prize brevity and efficiency. Disabled users who have long had no choice but to employ clunky screen readers may find that voice interfaces, particularly more modern voice assistants, offer a more streamlined experience.

Voice assistants

When we think of voice assistants (the subset of voice interfaces now commonplace in living rooms, smart homes, and offices), many of us immediately picture HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey or hear Majel Barrett’s voice as the omniscient computer in Star Trek. Voice assistants are akin to personal concierges that can answer questions, schedule appointments, conduct searches, and perform other common day-to-day tasks. And they’re rapidly gaining more attention from accessibility advocates for their assistive potential.

Before the earliest IVR systems found success in the enterprise, Apple published a demonstration video in 1987 depicting the Knowledge Navigator, a voice assistant that could transcribe spoken words and recognize human speech to a great degree of accuracy. Then, in 2001, Tim Berners-Lee and others formulated their vision for a Semantic Web “agent” that would perform typical errands like “checking calendars, making appointments, and finding locations” (, behind paywall). It wasn’t until 2011 that Apple’s Siri finally entered the picture, making voice assistants a tangible reality for consumers.

Thanks to the plethora of voice assistants available today, there is considerable variation in how programmable and customizable certain voice assistants are over others (Fig 1.1). At one extreme, everything except vendor-provided features is locked down; for example, at the time of their release, the core functionality of Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana couldn’t be extended beyond their existing capabilities. Even today, it isn’t possible to program Siri to perform arbitrary functions, because there’s no means by which developers can interact with Siri at a low level, apart from predefined categories of tasks like sending messages, hailing rideshares, making restaurant reservations, and certain others.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home offer a core foundation on which developers can build custom voice interfaces. For this reason, programmable voice assistants that lend themselves to customization and extensibility are becoming increasingly popular for developers who feel stifled by the limitations of Siri and Cortana. Amazon offers the Alexa Skills Kit, a developer framework for building custom voice interfaces for Amazon Alexa, while Google Home offers the ability to program arbitrary Google Assistant skills. Today, users can choose from among thousands of custom-built skills within both the Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant ecosystems.

As corporations like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google continue to stake their territory, they’re also selling and open-sourcing an unprecedented array of tools and frameworks for designers and developers that aim to make building voice interfaces as easy as possible, even without code.

Often by necessity, voice assistants like Amazon Alexa tend to be monochannel—they’re tightly coupled to a device and can’t be accessed on a computer or smartphone instead. By contrast, many development platforms like Google’s Dialogflow have introduced omnichannel capabilities so users can build a single conversational interface that then manifests as a voice interface, textual chatbot, and IVR system upon deployment. I don’t prescribe any specific implementation approaches in this design-focused book, but in Chapter 4 we’ll get into some of the implications these variables might have on the way you build out your design artifacts.

Voice Content

Simply put, voice content is content delivered through voice. To preserve what makes human conversation so compelling in the first place, voice content needs to be free-flowing and organic, contextless and concise—everything written content isn’t.

Our world is replete with voice content in various forms: screen readers reciting website content, voice assistants rattling off a weather forecast, and automated phone hotline responses governed by IVR systems. In this book, we’re most concerned with content delivered auditorily—not as an option, but as a necessity.

For many of us, our first foray into informational voice interfaces will be to deliver content to users. There’s only one problem: any content we already have isn’t in any way ready for this new habitat. So how do we make the content trapped on our websites more conversational? And how do we write new copy that lends itself to voice interactions?

Lately, we’ve begun slicing and dicing our content in unprecedented ways. Websites are, in many respects, colossal vaults of what I call macrocontent: lengthy prose that can extend for infinitely scrollable miles in a browser window, like microfilm viewers of newspaper archives. Back in 2002, well before the present-day ubiquity of voice assistants, technologist Anil Dash defined microcontent as permalinked pieces of content that stay legible regardless of environment, such as email or text messages:

A day’s weather forcast [sic], the arrival and departure times for an airplane flight, an abstract from a long publication, or a single instant message can all be examples of microcontent. ()

I’d update Dash’s definition of microcontent to include all examples of bite-sized content that go well beyond written communiqués. After all, today we encounter microcontent in interfaces where a small snippet of copy is displayed alone, unmoored from the browser, like a textbot confirmation of a restaurant reservation. Microcontent offers the best opportunity to gauge how your content can be stretched to the very edges of its capabilities, informing delivery channels both established and novel.

As microcontent, voice content is unique because it’s an example of how content is experienced in time rather than in space. We can glance at a digital sign underground for an instant and know when the next train is arriving, but voice interfaces hold our attention captive for periods of time that we can’t easily escape or skip, something screen reader users are all too familiar with.

Because microcontent is fundamentally made up of isolated blobs with no relation to the channels where they’ll eventually end up, we need to ensure that our microcontent truly performs well as voice content—and that means focusing on the two most important traits of robust voice content: voice content legibility and voice content discoverability.

Fundamentally, the legibility and discoverability of our voice content both have to do with how voice content manifests in perceived time and space.

In the 1950s, many in the elite running community had begun to believe it wasn’t possible to run a mile in less than four minutes. Runners had been attempting it since the late 19th century and were beginning to draw the conclusion that the human body simply wasn’t built for the task. 

But on May 6, 1956, Roger Bannister took everyone by surprise. It was a cold, wet day in Oxford, England—conditions no one expected to lend themselves to record-setting—and yet Bannister did just that, running a mile in 3:59.4 and becoming the first person in the record books to run a mile in under four minutes. 

This shift in the benchmark had profound effects; the world now knew that the four-minute mile was possible. Bannister’s record lasted only forty-six days, when it was snatched away by Australian runner John Landy. Then a year later, three runners all beat the four-minute barrier together in the same race. Since then, over 1,400 runners have officially run a mile in under four minutes; the current record is 3:43.13, held by Moroccan athlete Hicham El Guerrouj.

We achieve far more when we believe that something is possible, and we will believe it’s possible only when we see someone else has already done it—and as with human running speed, so it is with what we believe are the hard limits for how a website needs to perform.

Establishing standards for a sustainable web

In most major industries, the key metrics of environmental performance are fairly well established, such as miles per gallon for cars or energy per square meter for homes. The tools and methods for calculating those metrics are standardized as well, which keeps everyone on the same page when doing environmental assessments. In the world of websites and apps, however, we aren’t held to any particular environmental standards, and only recently have gained the tools and methods we need to even make an environmental assessment.

The primary goal in sustainable web design is to reduce carbon emissions. However, it’s almost impossible to actually measure the amount of CO₂ produced by a web product. We can’t measure the fumes coming out of the exhaust pipes on our laptops. The emissions of our websites are far away, out of sight and out of mind, coming out of power stations burning coal and gas. We have no way to trace the electrons from a website or app back to the power station where the electricity is being generated and actually know the exact amount of greenhouse gas produced. So what do we do? 

If we can’t measure the actual carbon emissions, then we need to find what we can measure. The primary factors that could be used as indicators of carbon emissions are:

1. Data transfer 
2. Carbon intensity of electricity

Let’s take a look at how we can use these metrics to quantify the energy consumption, and in turn the carbon footprint, of the websites and web apps we create.

Data transfer

Most researchers use kilowatt-hours per gigabyte (kWh/GB) as a metric of energy efficiency when measuring the amount of data transferred over the internet when a website or application is used. This provides a great reference point for energy consumption and carbon emissions. As a rule of thumb, the more data transferred, the more energy used in the data center, telecoms networks, and end user devices.

For web pages, data transfer for a single visit can be most easily estimated by measuring the page weight, meaning the transfer size of the page in kilobytes the first time someone visits the page. It’s fairly easy to measure using the developer tools in any modern web browser. Often your web hosting account will include statistics for the total data transfer of any web application (Fig 2.1).

The nice thing about page weight as a metric is that it allows us to compare the efficiency of web pages on a level playing field without confusing the issue with constantly changing traffic volumes. 

Reducing page weight requires a large scope. By early 2020, the median page weight was 1.97 MB for setups the HTTP Archive classifies as “desktop” and 1.77 MB for “mobile,” with desktop increasing 36 percent since January 2016 and mobile page weights nearly doubling in the same period (Fig 2.2). Roughly half of this data transfer is image files, making images the single biggest source of carbon emissions on the average website. 

History clearly shows us that our web pages can be smaller, if only we set our minds to it. While most technologies become ever more energy efficient, including the underlying technology of the web such as data centers and transmission networks, websites themselves are a technology that becomes less efficient as time goes on.

You might be familiar with the concept of performance budgeting as a way of focusing a project team on creating faster user experiences. For example, we might specify that the website must load in a maximum of one second on a broadband connection and three seconds on a 3G connection. Much like speed limits while driving, performance budgets are upper limits rather than vague suggestions, so the goal should always be to come in under budget.

Designing for fast performance does often lead to reduced data transfer and emissions, but it isn’t always the case. Web performance is often more about the subjective perception of load times than it is about the true efficiency of the underlying system, whereas page weight and transfer size are more objective measures and more reliable benchmarks for sustainable web design. 

We can set a page weight budget in reference to a benchmark of industry averages, using data from sources like HTTP Archive. We can also benchmark page weight against competitors or the old version of the website we’re replacing. For example, we might set a maximum page weight budget as equal to our most efficient competitor, or we could set the benchmark lower to guarantee we are best in class. 

If we want to take it to the next level, then we could also start looking at the transfer size of our web pages for repeat visitors. Although page weight for the first time someone visits is the easiest thing to measure, and easy to compare on a like-for-like basis, we can learn even more if we start looking at transfer size in other scenarios too. For example, visitors who load the same page multiple times will likely have a high percentage of the files cached in their browser, meaning they don’t need to transfer all of the files on subsequent visits. Likewise, a visitor who navigates to new pages on the same website will likely not need to load the full page each time, as some global assets from areas like the header and footer may already be cached in their browser. Measuring transfer size at this next level of detail can help us learn even more about how we can optimize efficiency for users who regularly visit our pages, and enable us to set page weight budgets for additional scenarios beyond the first visit.

Page weight budgets are easy to track throughout a design and development process. Although they don’t actually tell us carbon emission and energy consumption analytics directly, they give us a clear indication of efficiency relative to other websites. And as transfer size is an effective analog for energy consumption, we can actually use it to estimate energy consumption too.

In summary, reduced data transfer translates to energy efficiency, a key factor to reducing carbon emissions of web products. The more efficient our products, the less electricity they use, and the less fossil fuels need to be burned to produce the electricity to power them. But as we’ll see next, since all web products demand some power, it’s important to consider the source of that electricity, too.

Carbon intensity of electricity

Regardless of energy efficiency, the level of pollution caused by digital products depends on the carbon intensity of the energy being used to power them. Carbon intensity is a term used to define the grams of CO₂ produced for every kilowatt-hour of electricity (gCO₂/kWh). This varies widely, with renewable energy sources and nuclear having an extremely low carbon intensity of less than 10 gCO₂/kWh (even when factoring in their construction); whereas fossil fuels have very high carbon intensity of approximately 200–400 gCO₂/kWh. 

Most electricity comes from national or state grids, where energy from a variety of different sources is mixed together with varying levels of carbon intensity. The distributed nature of the internet means that a single user of a website or app might be using energy from multiple different grids simultaneously; a website user in Paris uses electricity from the French national grid to power their home internet and devices, but the website’s data center could be in Dallas, USA, pulling electricity from the Texas grid, while the telecoms networks use energy from everywhere between Dallas and Paris.

We don’t have control over the full energy supply of web services, but we do have some control over where we host our projects. With a data center using a significant proportion of the energy of any website, locating the data center in an area with low carbon energy will tangibly reduce its carbon emissions. Danish startup Tomorrow reports and maps this user-contributed data, and a glance at their map shows how, for example, choosing a data center in France will have significantly lower carbon emissions than a data center in the Netherlands (Fig 2.3).

That said, we don’t want to locate our servers too far away from our users; it takes energy to transmit data through the telecom’s networks, and the further the data travels, the more energy is consumed. Just like food miles, we can think of the distance from the data center to the website’s core user base as “megabyte miles”—and we want it to be as small as possible.

Using the distance itself as a benchmark, we can use website analytics to identify the country, state, or even city where our core user group is located and measure the distance from that location to the data center used by our hosting company. This will be a somewhat fuzzy metric as we don’t know the precise center of mass of our users or the exact location of a data center, but we can at least get a rough idea. 

For example, if a website is hosted in London but the primary user base is on the West Coast of the USA, then we could look up the distance from London to San Francisco, which is 5,300 miles. That’s a long way! We can see that hosting it somewhere in North America, ideally on the West Coast, would significantly reduce the distance and thus the energy used to transmit the data. In addition, locating our servers closer to our visitors helps reduce latency and delivers better user experience, so it’s a win-win.

Converting it back to carbon emissions

If we combine carbon intensity with a calculation for energy consumption, we can calculate the carbon emissions of our websites and apps. A tool my team created does this by measuring the data transfer over the wire when loading a web page, calculating the amount of electricity associated, and then converting that into a figure for CO₂ (Fig 2.4). It also factors in whether or not the web hosting is powered by renewable energy.

If you want to take it to the next level and tailor the data more accurately to the unique aspects of your project, the Energy and Emissions Worksheet accompanying this book shows you how.

With the ability to calculate carbon emissions for our projects, we could actually take a page weight budget one step further and set carbon budgets as well. CO₂ is not a metric commonly used in web projects; we’re more familiar with kilobytes and megabytes, and can fairly easily look at design options and files to assess how big they are. Translating that into carbon adds a layer of abstraction that isn’t as intuitive—but carbon budgets do focus our minds on the primary thing we’re trying to reduce, and support the core objective of sustainable web design: reducing carbon emissions.

Browser Energy

Data transfer might be the simplest and most complete analog for energy consumption in our digital projects, but by giving us one number to represent the energy used in the data center, the telecoms networks, and the end user’s devices, it can’t offer us insights into the efficiency in any specific part of the system.

One part of the system we can look at in more detail is the energy used by end users’ devices. As front-end web technologies become more advanced, the computational load is increasingly moving from the data center to users’ devices, whether they be phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, or even smart TVs. Modern web browsers allow us to implement more complex styling and animation on the fly using CSS and JavaScript. Furthermore, JavaScript libraries such as Angular and React allow us to create applications where the “thinking” work is done partly or entirely in the browser. 

All of these advances are exciting and open up new possibilities for what the web can do to serve society and create positive experiences. However, more computation in the user’s web browser means more energy used by their devices. This has implications not just environmentally, but also for user experience and inclusivity. Applications that put a heavy processing load on the user’s device can inadvertently exclude users with older, slower devices and cause batteries on phones and laptops to drain faster. Furthermore, if we build web applications that require the user to have up-to-date, powerful devices, people throw away old devices much more frequently. This isn’t just bad for the environment, but it puts a disproportionate financial burden on the poorest in society.

In part because the tools are limited, and partly because there are so many different models of devices, it’s difficult to measure website energy consumption on end users’ devices. One tool we do currently have is the Energy Impact monitor inside the developer console of the Safari browser (Fig 2.5).

You know when you load a website and your computer’s cooling fans start spinning so frantically you think it might actually take off? That’s essentially what this tool is measuring. 

It shows us the percentage of CPU used and the duration of CPU usage when loading the web page, and uses these figures to generate an energy impact rating. It doesn’t give us precise data for the amount of electricity used in kilowatts, but the information it does provide can be used to benchmark how efficiently your websites use energy and set targets for improvement.

Antiracist economist Kim Crayton says that “intention without strategy is chaos.” We’ve discussed how our biases, assumptions, and inattention toward marginalized and vulnerable groups lead to dangerous and unethical tech—but what, specifically, do we need to do to fix it? The intention to make our tech safer is not enough; we need a strategy.

This chapter will equip you with that plan of action. It covers how to integrate safety principles into your design work in order to create tech that’s safe, how to convince your stakeholders that this work is necessary, and how to respond to the critique that what we actually need is more diversity. (Spoiler: we do, but diversity alone is not the antidote to fixing unethical, unsafe tech.)

The process for inclusive safety

When you are designing for safety, your goals are to:

• identify ways your product can be used for abuse,
• design ways to prevent the abuse, and
• provide support for vulnerable users to reclaim power and control.

The Process for Inclusive Safety is a tool to help you reach those goals (Fig 5.1). It’s a methodology I created in 2018 to capture the various techniques I was using when designing products with safety in mind. Whether you are creating an entirely new product or adding to an existing feature, the Process can help you make your product safe and inclusive. The Process includes five general areas of action:

• Conducting research
• Creating archetypes
• Brainstorming problems
• Designing solutions
• Testing for safety

The Process is meant to be flexible—it won’t make sense for teams to implement every step in some situations. Use the parts that are relevant to your unique work and context; this is meant to be something you can insert into your existing design practice.

And once you use it, if you have an idea for making it better or simply want to provide context of how it helped your team, please get in touch with me. It’s a living document that I hope will continue to be a useful and realistic tool that technologists can use in their day-to-day work.

If you’re working on a product specifically for a vulnerable group or survivors of some form of trauma, such as an app for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, or drug addiction, be sure to read Chapter 7, which covers that situation explicitly and should be handled a bit differently. The guidelines here are for prioritizing safety when designing a more general product that will have a wide user base (which, we already know from statistics, will include certain groups that should be protected from harm). Chapter 7 is focused on products that are specifically for vulnerable groups and people who have experienced trauma.

Step 1: Conduct research

Design research should include a broad analysis of how your tech might be weaponized for abuse as well as specific insights into the experiences of survivors and perpetrators of that type of abuse. At this stage, you and your team will investigate issues of interpersonal harm and abuse, and explore any other safety, security, or inclusivity issues that might be a concern for your product or service, like data security, racist algorithms, and harassment.

Broad research

Your project should begin with broad, general research into similar products and issues around safety and ethical concerns that have already been reported. For example, a team building a smart home device would do well to understand the multitude of ways that existing smart home devices have been used as tools of abuse. If your product will involve AI, seek to understand the potentials for racism and other issues that have been reported in existing AI products. Nearly all types of technology have some kind of potential or actual harm that’s been reported on in the news or written about by academics. Google Scholar is a useful tool for finding these studies.

Specific research: Survivors

When possible and appropriate, include direct research (surveys and interviews) with people who are experts in the forms of harm you have uncovered. Ideally, you’ll want to interview advocates working in the space of your research first so that you have a more solid understanding of the topic and are better equipped to not retraumatize survivors. If you’ve uncovered possible domestic violence issues, for example, the experts you’ll want to speak with are survivors themselves, as well as workers at domestic violence hotlines, shelters, other related nonprofits, and lawyers.

Especially when interviewing survivors of any kind of trauma, it is important to pay people for their knowledge and lived experiences. Don’t ask survivors to share their trauma for free, as this is exploitative. While some survivors may not want to be paid, you should always make the offer in the initial ask. An alternative to payment is to donate to an organization working against the type of violence that the interviewee experienced. We’ll talk more about how to appropriately interview survivors in Chapter 6.

Specific research: Abusers

It’s unlikely that teams aiming to design for safety will be able to interview self-proclaimed abusers or people who have broken laws around things like hacking. Don’t make this a goal; rather, try to get at this angle in your general research. Aim to understand how abusers or bad actors weaponize technology to use against others, how they cover their tracks, and how they explain or rationalize the abuse.

Step 2: Create archetypes

Once you’ve finished conducting your research, use your insights to create abuser and survivor archetypes. Archetypes are not personas, as they’re not based on real people that you interviewed and surveyed. Instead, they’re based on your research into likely safety issues, much like when we design for accessibility: we don’t need to have found a group of blind or low-vision users in our interview pool to create a design that’s inclusive of them. Instead, we base those designs on existing research into what this group needs. Personas typically represent real users and include many details, while archetypes are broader and can be more generalized.

The abuser archetype is someone who will look at the product as a tool to perform harm (Fig 5.2). They may be trying to harm someone they don’t know through surveillance or anonymous harassment, or they may be trying to control, monitor, abuse, or torment someone they know personally.

The survivor archetype is someone who is being abused with the product. There are various situations to consider in terms of the archetype’s understanding of the abuse and how to put an end to it: Do they need proof of abuse they already suspect is happening, or are they unaware they’ve been targeted in the first place and need to be alerted (Fig 5.3)?

You may want to make multiple survivor archetypes to capture a range of different experiences. They may know that the abuse is happening but not be able to stop it, like when an abuser locks them out of IoT devices; or they know it’s happening but don’t know how, such as when a stalker keeps figuring out their location (Fig 5.4). Include as many of these scenarios as you need to in your survivor archetype. You’ll use these later on when you design solutions to help your survivor archetypes achieve their goals of preventing and ending abuse.

It may be useful for you to create persona-like artifacts for your archetypes, such as the three examples shown. Instead of focusing on the demographic information we often see in personas, focus on their goals. The goals of the abuser will be to carry out the specific abuse you’ve identified, while the goals of the survivor will be to prevent abuse, understand that abuse is happening, make ongoing abuse stop, or regain control over the technology that’s being used for abuse. Later, you’ll brainstorm how to prevent the abuser’s goals and assist the survivor’s goals.

And while the “abuser/survivor” model fits most cases, it doesn’t fit all, so modify it as you need to. For example, if you uncovered an issue with security, such as the ability for someone to hack into a home camera system and talk to children, the malicious hacker would get the abuser archetype and the child’s parents would get survivor archetype.

Step 3: Brainstorm problems

After creating archetypes, brainstorm novel abuse cases and safety issues. “Novel” means things not found in your research; you’re trying to identify completely new safety issues that are unique to your product or service. The goal with this step is to exhaust every effort of identifying harms your product could cause. You aren’t worrying about how to prevent the harm yet—that comes in the next step.

How could your product be used for any kind of abuse, outside of what you’ve already identified in your research? I recommend setting aside at least a few hours with your team for this process.

If you’re looking for somewhere to start, try doing a Black Mirror brainstorm. This exercise is based on the show Black Mirror, which features stories about the dark possibilities of technology. Try to figure out how your product would be used in an episode of the show—the most wild, awful, out-of-control ways it could be used for harm. When I’ve led Black Mirror brainstorms, participants usually end up having a good deal of fun (which I think is great—it’s okay to have fun when designing for safety!). I recommend time-boxing a Black Mirror brainstorm to half an hour, and then dialing it back and using the rest of the time thinking of more realistic forms of harm.

After you’ve identified as many opportunities for abuse as possible, you may still not feel confident that you’ve uncovered every potential form of harm. A healthy amount of anxiety is normal when you’re doing this kind of work. It’s common for teams designing for safety to worry, “Have we really identified every possible harm? What if we’ve missed something?” If you’ve spent at least four hours coming up with ways your product could be used for harm and have run out of ideas, go to the next step.

It’s impossible to guarantee you’ve thought of everything; instead of aiming for 100 percent assurance, recognize that you’ve taken this time and have done the best you can, and commit to continuing to prioritize safety in the future. Once your product is released, your users may identify new issues that you missed; aim to receive that feedback graciously and course-correct quickly.

Step 4: Design solutions

At this point, you should have a list of ways your product can be used for harm as well as survivor and abuser archetypes describing opposing user goals. The next step is to identify ways to design against the identified abuser’s goals and to support the survivor’s goals. This step is a good one to insert alongside existing parts of your design process where you’re proposing solutions for the various problems your research uncovered.

Some questions to ask yourself to help prevent harm and support your archetypes include:

• Can you design your product in such a way that the identified harm cannot happen in the first place? If not, what roadblocks can you put up to prevent the harm from happening?
• How can you make the victim aware that abuse is happening through your product?
• How can you help the victim understand what they need to do to make the problem stop?
• Can you identify any types of user activity that would indicate some form of harm or abuse? Could your product help the user access support?

In some products, it’s possible to proactively recognize that harm is happening. For example, a pregnancy app might be modified to allow the user to report that they were the victim of an assault, which could trigger an offer to receive resources for local and national organizations. This sort of proactiveness is not always possible, but it’s worth taking a half hour to discuss if any type of user activity would indicate some form of harm or abuse, and how your product could assist the user in receiving help in a safe manner.

That said, use caution: you don’t want to do anything that could put a user in harm’s way if their devices are being monitored. If you do offer some kind of proactive help, always make it voluntary, and think through other safety issues, such as the need to keep the user in-app in case an abuser is checking their search history. We’ll walk through a good example of this in the next chapter.

Step 5: Test for safety

The final step is to test your prototypes from the point of view of your archetypes: the person who wants to weaponize the product for harm and the victim of the harm who needs to regain control over the technology. Just like any other kind of product testing, at this point you’ll aim to rigorously test out your safety solutions so that you can identify gaps and correct them, validate that your designs will help keep your users safe, and feel more confident releasing your product into the world.

Ideally, safety testing happens along with usability testing. If you’re at a company that doesn’t do usability testing, you might be able to use safety testing to cleverly perform both; a user who goes through your design attempting to weaponize the product against someone else can also be encouraged to point out interactions or other elements of the design that don’t make sense to them.

You’ll want to conduct safety testing on either your final prototype or the actual product if it’s already been released. There’s nothing wrong with testing an existing product that wasn’t designed with safety goals in mind from the onset—“retrofitting” it for safety is a good thing to do.

Remember that testing for safety involves testing from the perspective of both an abuser and a survivor, though it may not make sense for you to do both. Alternatively, if you made multiple survivor archetypes to capture multiple scenarios, you’ll want to test from the perspective of each one.

As with other sorts of usability testing, you as the designer are most likely too close to the product and its design by this point to be a valuable tester; you know the product too well. Instead of doing it yourself, set up testing as you would with other usability testing: find someone who is not familiar with the product and its design, set the scene, give them a task, encourage them to think out loud, and observe how they attempt to complete it.

Abuser testing

The goal of this testing is to understand how easy it is for someone to weaponize your product for harm. Unlike with usability testing, you want to make it impossible, or at least difficult, for them to achieve their goal. Reference the goals in the abuser archetype you created earlier, and use your product in an attempt to achieve them.

For example, for a fitness app with GPS-enabled location features, we can imagine that the abuser archetype would have the goal of figuring out where his ex-girlfriend now lives. With this goal in mind, you’d try everything possible to figure out the location of another user who has their privacy settings enabled. You might try to see her running routes, view any available information on her profile, view anything available about her location (which she has set to private), and investigate the profiles of any other users somehow connected with her account, such as her followers.

If by the end of this you’ve managed to uncover some of her location data, despite her having set her profile to private, you know now that your product enables stalking. Your next step is to go back to step 4 and figure out how to prevent this from happening. You may need to repeat the process of designing solutions and testing them more than once.

Survivor testing

Survivor testing involves identifying how to give information and power to the survivor. It might not always make sense based on the product or context. Thwarting the attempt of an abuser archetype to stalk someone also satisfies the goal of the survivor archetype to not be stalked, so separate testing wouldn’t be needed from the survivor’s perspective.

However, there are cases where it makes sense. For example, for a smart thermostat, a survivor archetype’s goals would be to understand who or what is making the temperature change when they aren’t doing it themselves. You could test this by looking for the thermostat’s history log and checking for usernames, actions, and times; if you couldn’t find that information, you would have more work to do in step 4.

Another goal might be regaining control of the thermostat once the survivor realizes the abuser is remotely changing its settings. Your test would involve attempting to figure out how to do this: are there instructions that explain how to remove another user and change the password, and are they easy to find? This might again reveal that more work is needed to make it clear to the user how they can regain control of the device or account.

Stress testing

To make your product more inclusive and compassionate, consider adding stress testing. This concept comes from Design for Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher. The authors pointed out that personas typically center people who are having a good day—but real users are often anxious, stressed out, having a bad day, or even experiencing tragedy. These are called “stress cases,” and testing your products for users in stress-case situations can help you identify places where your design lacks compassion. Design for Real Life has more details about what it looks like to incorporate stress cases into your design as well as many other great tactics for compassionate design.