Our Effed Up World (FrightFest 2026)

Back in 2021, before I started writing for The Geek Show, I received an Instagram DM from a 17-year-old transfem filmmaker from Australia named Alice Maio Mackay, who had just completed her first feature film and wanted to share it with as many transgender people on the horror scene as she could; that film was So Vam (2021). A fresh and thoroughly endearing queer teen vampire movie that was quite unlike anything else I had seen on the horror festival circuit up to that point, especially when it came to transgender screen storytelling. Flash forward 5 years to the present, and Alice is now one of the most recognisable and celebrated names from the new wave of transgender filmmaking, having been featured in Vogue Australia and working in collaboration with the likes of Vera Drew (The People’s Joker), Louise Weard (Castration Movie Anthology), and Jane Schoenbrun – even shadowing for the latter on their highly-anticipated latest, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026).

Our Effed Up World, which premiered in the UK as part of Tubi FrightFest’s Discovery Screen 2 strand, is Alice’s 7^th feature genre directorial effort in 5 years; to call that impressive would be a major understatement, and makes it more than clear as to why and how she has made such a name for herself in the world of independent cinema. Alice’s career as a filmmaker is not only astounding for how prolific she is, but also because of the consistent quality of her work; whether her characters are facing off against bigoted demons, masked killers, or brain-hijacking parasitic worms that feed on hate, Mackay has a skill for balancing sincerity with camp, fun with serious social commentary, and economical pacing with a daring, fiercely political punk edge. Our Effed Up World is a more overtly “polished” affair than some of her previous smaller-scale productions, in good part due to the fact that it was produced by the aforementioned Schoenbrun, and stars a variety of celebrated international names from the indie film world – but how does it stack up when compared with the rest of Alice’s pictures?

Our Effed Up World follows Sheri (Sara Thompson), a young woman grieving the recent loss of her beloved grandmother Grace (Kerry Armstrong), something which has put a great strain on her relationship with her astronomer father, Hank (Scott Major). Her plan for dealing with the pain of Grace’s death largely consists of breaking up with her deadbeat boyfriend Harry (Jordan Dulieu), hanging out at her friend Finn’s (Jess McLeod) video rental store, and smoking a large quantity of cannabis with her bestie Poppy (Annapurna Sriram). Unfortunately for her, these plans are interrupted by the arrival of a glowing green meteor containing some less-than-friendly extra-terrestrial visitors, and it is up to Sheri and her friends to save the world from the impending alien invasion!

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In case you hadn’t noticed thus far, Our Effed Up World has a rather stacked cast. Already I’ve mentioned Annapurna Sriram (best known for her recent directorial debut Fucktoys) and Jess McLeod (who is superb in Ben Wheatley’s latest, Normal), but the film also features a brief cameo appearance from Lesbian Space Princess (2025) co-director Leela Varghese. I’m also delighted to mention that the film contains a brief animated sequence a’ la’ Mackay’s Carnage for Christmas (2024), which features none other than I Saw the TV Glow (2024) star Jack Haven and 13 Reason Why’s Tommy Dorfman as alternate versions of characters from So Vam, which was thoroughly unexpected and a real treat. A lot of the film’s cast are returning faces from Mackay’s prior feature, The Serpent’s Skin (2025), which is thoroughly welcome – though the wild, experimental, ultra-queer editorial flair that Vera Drew brought to said previous film is sorely missed here.

Our Effed Up World is at its strongest during its Kevin Smith-esque hangout sequences, which are a key feature of all of Alice’s films, and frequently what they revolve around; it is always a joy to watch Alice, her co-writer Ben Pahl Robinson, and the cast bring together these scenes of LGBTQ+ friends sitting together and having very real conversations, serious and casual alike, about real-world issues which we don’t often get to see brought to the screen. I remarked in my review of T-Blockers (2023) a few years back – my favourite of Alice’s movies to date – that I found a great deal of joy in how her films always feature an element of queer friends having fun in one another’s company in spite of the stakes against them and the constant background presence of threat, and I find that this aspect of her work speaks to the current reality of living as a transgender person more than most works of popular media do. I will note, however, that Our Effed Up World is Alice’s first film since 2022’s Bad Girl Boogey not to follow a transgender protagonist, and whilst I by no means believe any trans filmmaker should be made to make all of their films directly about the “transgender experience”, it was an element of her previous work which I found to make her stories resonate even more with me when they would normally; that also isn’t to say that Our Effed Up World lacks emotional depth or sincerity, because it clearly has that in spades as with the rest of Alice’s films, but I did personally find that the film connected with me less than something like Satranic Panic (2023) or The Serpent’s Skin, where queerness was at the forefront of the story as opposed to just an inherent, but nonetheless great, aspect of Alice’s filmmaking.

Whilst the horror aspect of Alice’s films is always fun, and she is clearly a very genre-literate filmmaker, it is rarely the main focus of her stories, though the design of the aliens in this stands out as a nicely gnarly reworking of classic Roswell-era tropes; the Greys on display in Our Effed Up World are the missing link between Doctor Who’s Silence and Roger Corman’s Humanoids from the Deep (1980), and just as grotesquely vile as that comparison might imply. Unfortunately, we hear a lot more about the extraterrestrial threat than we see of it, and what we hear is primarily based on very audacious assumptions from our central cast of characters; a lot of the film’s second half is composed of characters having loud, expository conversations where certainties are found from little to no evidence, and I struggled to follow where it was all going before the film abruptly comes to a close.

It should be stated that a lot of Our Effed Up World’s style and structure is a feature as opposed to a bug, particularly given its obvious influences; Alice’s latest is styled like a lost CW television pilot, and takes a lot of clear inspiration from both Steven Moffat-era Doctor Who and the aforementioned network’s superhero shows, both of which have recognisable elements and stylistic traits that transfer naturally to what this film is doing. As I am someone who was decidedly not a fan of most of Moffat’s tenure as Who showrunner, I am aware that Our Effed Up World will land far more successfully for the many who are; if a director makes 7 films in 5 years, chances are one of them won’t be my thing, and that isn’t an indicator towards the quality of the film, and I can fully recognise the strengths of Alice’s latest even though I don’t prefer it to some of her other work. In a lot of ways, this is Alice’s most polished work, and is likely to be her most accessible for many, with a far broader potential appeal – but I personally prefer her scrappier, punkier efforts, and would have liked to see another project in the vein of last year’s fierce, edgy, sexy release The Serpent’s Skin, and that’s all down to my personal tastes.

With all that being said, I’ll always encourage people to check out a new Alice Maio Mackay movie, and by now they’ve become a kind of annual event on the festival circuit that no queer horror fan should miss. Here’s to feature number 8…

ROBYN’S ARCHIVE – OUR EFFED UP WORLD