Brooklyn Horror 2026 Review: SENDER, You've Got (Some Freaky) Mail

Julia (Britt Lower) is not doing well.

Recently fired from her job and three weeks into her still-fragile sobriety, she starts reluctantly going to AA meetings and moves to a new house, courtesy of her overbearing sister, Tat (Anna Baryshnikov).

The sisters’ relationship is historically strained, the meetings don’t bring Julia much comfort, and her desperate attempt to establish new meaningful connections by roping Whitney (Rhea Seehorn), a woman she met in the group, to be her sponsor, also fails.

Soon, however, Julia's previous struggles fade in comparison to an unexpected new one, as she starts receiving packages with different household products, none of which she actually ordered. While the first few times seem like a harmless enough prank or a scam attempt, it soon becomes clear that the items Julia keeps receiving are connected to her personal history, including a few drunken episodes she struggles to fully recollect.

The customer support of the delivery company Smirk (standing in for Amazon) proves to be unhelpful. And while quirky delivery man Charlie (David Dastmalchian), with whom Julia strikes something akin to friendship, vows to provide some answers, she keeps unraveling.

Sender, which premiered earlier in 2026 at the SXSW film festival, is a debut feature of Russell Goldman, which grew out of his 2022 short film, Return to Sender. While the short, starring Allison Tolman, featured a similar premise and characters, turning it into feature form obviously came with the challenge of sustaining the high concept throughout a more significant runtime. Goldman, who also wrote the screenplay for the film, manages the task by packaging (pun intended) the central mystery into a captivating sensory experience.

While Sender is for sure a brain teaser, it also never fails to tickle the audience’s nerve endings and their emotions. With its sharp lightning, its mad camera angles (which at some point even imitate the POV of Julia’s phone), and jumpy, disorienting editing, the film puts us right into Julia’s deteriorating mindset.

But Julia is already all of us – an unreliable narrator in a reality that also shouldn’t be trusted that easily. For all the uniqueness of Julia’s plight, she does exist in a very familiar world: The digital age, where a random customer support person on the other side of the screen is often expected to become a source of emotional support, and where the next dose of dopamine is just a click and one to two business days away from arriving on your doorstep.

While keeping its form of a paranoid thriller about stalking -- as well as serving as a dark comedy satirizing our consumerist society -- at its core, Sender is a film about the nature and ways of addiction. The specifics of the condition might not matter: While Julia spends most of the runtime obsessing over solving the mystery, her restless journey still exhibits the same pattern as would be the case with alcohol and uncontrollable shopping habits.

Britt Lower is amazing (as she always reliably is in these kinds of stories) as someone who’s desperately searching for something tangible in a world that progressively looks like a simulated reality. As it glitches on screen and around us, it’s hard not to commiserate with this poignant film’s tortured heroine in her wish to restore things to a point where at least some of it made some sort of sense.

The film screened at the 2026 Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.