Annapurna’s Sriram’s Fucktoys (2025) is about Jesus as a queer, transmasc whore in a godless world. The film opens with AP (played by the director), Jill of all sex trades, having a reading with Tarot Woman (Big Freeda). One of the cards that she pulls is the Hanged Man, immediately evoking Christ. Tarot Woman tells AP that she has a curse, a warning that is repeated three times throughout the film, and that needs to make a sacrifice to lift it. Tarot Woman offers to sacrifice a baby lamb to lift the curse for $1000, so AP sets off on her moped through Trashtown (a thinly veiled New Orleans) to raise the necessary funds.
Fucktoys is high camp, but it explores serious themes. Trashtown is a violent place, and much of this violence centers around AP’s gender ambiguous romantic friend Danni. When we first meet Danni, he is involved in a group fist fight. Later, he gets in a fight with an escorting client when the client demands that he sign a non-disclosure agreement. Furthermore, he tells AP that, when he was in prison, he shared a cell with “the Mechanic,” who killed and mutilated sex workers. This violence against sex workers is something AP herself will encounter by the end of the film.
There is no god in Trashtown, but there is care. AP cares for her friends, and they care for her. AP gives one friend $20 she earns from a domination session with a client, and another friend gives AP the number of an escorting client after she is fired from a go-go dancing gig at an orgy. AP and Danni care for each other throughout the film, and they are cared for by two parental figures. AP’s mother Luna offers Danni and AP sustenance when they visit her at her donut shop, and she comforts AP in the film’s final moments. AP’s escorting client Robert tells her that he feels like a father figure to her after she asks him to pick her up when her moped is stolen, and he later tenderly bandages Danni’s face. Yet, this care can only assuage but not prevent the violence the characters must navigate.
Fucktoys screens this evening, October 3, at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series “Avatars of the Whore.”
