Fantasia 2026 Review: OUR EFFED UP WORLD, Alice Maio Mackay's Hang Out Movie... With Aliens!
Australian wunderkind Alice Maio Mackay returns to the director’s chair for her eighth feature film, Our Effed Up World, celebrating its Canadian premiere at this year’s Fantasia. A science-fiction story about a group of young adults fighting off an alien invasion in the midst of life changing events that have already knocked them all off balance, Mackay has created an adrenaline spiked hang out movie that perhaps works better when it shifts its focus away from the danger.
There was no one more important in Sherri’s (Sara Thompson) life than her grandmother, Grace (Kerry Armstrong), so when cancer claimed her hero, Sherri’s life suddenly turned grey. She spends her days making sure her workaholic scientist father, Hank (Scott Major), remembers to eat, having banal, unsatisfying sex with her dopey boyfriend, Harry (Jordan Dulieu), and most importantly hanging with her friends, Poppy (Annapurna Sriram), Ash (Karis Oka), and Finn (Jess MacLeod). They pass the days in their dead-end town, apathetically dreaming of a bigger life, a life none of them seem too in a rush to get to.
Most of their time is spent at the divey video store inherited by Finn, a treasure trove of VHS tapes and obscurities left to them by a flighty uncle that transformed from the coolest thing every to an albatross around their neck. Ash works for Finn at the store, running the numbers and keeping the doors open by the skin of their teeth, while Sherri and Poppy fuck around at the grocery store job, making the best of a shitty situation.
When a green meteorite touches down in their nowhere town, things start to get weird and people start to disappear. At first astrophysicist Hank thinks nothing of it, the green glow is common for celestial bodies with a magnesium and nickel composition, but when their friends don’t turn up a quick check-in reveals blood-stained apartments, the crew gets worried. It turns out that an alien invasion is afoot, and is may be that Sherri and her pals are Earth’s only hope, and that’s a bummer.
Heavily inspired by Mackay’s obsession with obsolete media and the Tom Baker era of Doctor Who, Our Effed Up World works best when it sits with this crew and lets their chemistry do the talking. The sci-fi elements here are clearly a plot engine to justify bringing Sherri, Poppy, and the crew together for extended stretches, and I’m fine with that. Mackay’s writing and direction shine when allowing the characters space to breathe, relationships become clearer, dynamics evolve, and we know a lot more about Sherri than a film like this generally allows.
The creature – though kind of goofy in a Doctor Who kind of way – doesn’t get a ton of screen time, and what it does get is generally aligned with one of the film’s few kinetic action sequences. The scientific jargon employed by Hank to try and explain the particulars of this invasion is less engaging that the philosophical conversations it inspires as Sherri comes to grips with the trauma of losing her grandmother alongside her friends who are all bearing their own crosses to a lesser extent. Remove the alien and while the film would be different, I don’t think it would be any worse, the time spent with these friends sharing their hopes and fears it what makes Our Effed Up World tick.
Though her first few features have leaned heavily into campy gore and horror, her latest shows a level of maturity and chill that belies her age. At only twenty-one, Mackay has done more in the film industry than vets twice her age, creating her own niche of micro-budget gems that combine her own peculiar obsessions with reverence for the trailblazing cinema of John Waters, Troma, and even the Kuchar brothers. Mackay is a filmmaker who is evolving fast, and Our Effed Up World is further evidence that she contains multitudes, an almost meditative film that is vying for my personal favorite among her oeuvre, this one will surprise fans with not only its subject matter, but also its considered restraint.
