An erotic thriller cobbled together from the DNA of classic giallo films, Gregg Araki and Lena Dunham’s Girls, writer-director Alex Phillips’ Anything That Moves oozes with a creativity that washes over viewers in a warm glow — not unlike the orgasms its sex-worker protagonist gives to his clients. Sexy, shaggy and inventive, Phillips’ sophomore effort (after 2022’s admittedly unseen by me but deliciously-titled All Jacked Up and Full of Worms) further announces a provocative new voice in filmmaking, even as he skillfully echoes the visual language of genre movies from generations past.
Newcomer Hal Baum plays Liam Woodlawn, a delivery young-man who services the greater Chicago area alongside his girlfriend Thea (Jiana Nicole) as part of a greater network — accessible via app, of course — of on-demand sex workers. One day after the two of them roleplay a fairly innocuous jealousy scenario with a client, he turns up dead from a particularly grisly lobotomy where his brain has been replaced by cash that’s been decorated with images of genitalia. Liam’s detained and interrogated by a pair of overzealous cops, but shortly after they release him from their custody another of his customers gets killed.
Liam is appropriately despondent over the murders, but Thea remains surprisingly unconcerned about the risks of their vocation, inviting him to throuple up with her sister Julia (Jade Perry) as a distraction. As the body count rises and the murders occur in closer and closer proximity to Liam himself, pressure from the cops intensifies. Increasingly unsure who to trust, Liam embarks on an investigation of his own that spans the sex worker community, its marginalized (and increasingly targeted) clientele and even members of law enforcement.
While Liam in his bike messenger’s singlet only evokes the high-class polish of Jane Fonda’s callgirl Bree Daniels if you really squint, Anything That Moves owes a considerable debt to Alan Pakula’s paranoid 1971 thriller Klute. But its split-diopter shots of the murderer’s gloves (notably white, not black leather) juxtaposed with the young protagonist making his rounds also recall dozens of giallo, and as well as low-budget ’70s stuff like Christina Hornisher’s 1973 film Hollywood 90028 (recently rediscovered by Grindhouse Releasing) and William Lustig’s Maniac, among others.
Some of those comparisons are due to form — shot on celluloid, using lots of handheld camera — and others to substance, as it merges fantasy and nightmarish reality with enough dexterity to keep Liam and the audience both guessing. Additionally, the score by Cue Shop feels very much like the contained, beautiful but tonally ambivalent music associated with low-budget ’70s fare. But even for those (like yours truly) who fetishize bygone visual aesthetics, Anything That Moves is not, or not simply, a pastiche; fans of filmmakers like Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani (Amer, Let the Corpses Tan) will find much to enjoy in the film’s textures, but it ultimately feels cohesively modern and not simply because Liam manages his little enterprise mainly on his smartphone, and there are trap and EDM songs on the soundtrack. Viewers may identify similarities to everything from Araki’s Doom Generation to Simon Rumley’s Red, White and Blue, but the resulting film isn’t beholden to them, and that’s a good thing.
An unpolished gem himself, Baum effectively captures the competing impulses in Liam’s head: a gifted, empathetic lover who enjoys his bohemian lifestyle as much as he likes to monetize it, he’s genuinely troubled by the gruesome murders but also lacks the maturity to do more than react in the moment to each one. His lack of precision in the role mirrors the director’s and it serves the story well; you get a believable sense that this is some kid who learned he was good at fucking and is getting paid to do it, you know, until he decides to stop or something else better comes along. Jiana Nicole’s Thea is by comparison much more of a mystery for the audience, and though he doesn’t initially realize it, to Liam: he doesn’t question why she asks him to re-enact an incident where he inadvertently seduced her father, but he probably should. Nicole certainly makes Thea seductive enough to not be incentivized to ask, though.
As his law enforcement tormentors Dodge and Rick, Jack Dunphy and Frank V. Ross each carry enough demons of their own that you almost feel sorry for them — or at least, you get an immediate sense that they’re driven by a lot of unspoken pain. The casting of legendary adult film stars Ginger Lynn Allen and Nina Hartley as two of Liam’s customers brings, alternately, a vulnerability (both physical and emotional) and a kind of hard-won toughness that elevates their roles from cameos to more substantive reinforcers of his lifestyle and the movie’s themes.
Phillips’ portrait of Liam exudes sex positivity — the young man encourages a young couple to canoodle with each other instead of use him for a cuck fantasy (don’t worry, he still gets paid). That lack of judgment as he makes his rounds, whether providing tenderness or something a little more complicated, further amplifies the fact that this film, as an erotic thriller or neo-slasher, feels extremely contemporary. Mind you, I’m reluctant to commend the film for just “presenting” a more progressive, open-minded perspective on sex, much less sex work; values one agrees with aren’t by themselves enough for a recommendation. But narratively it makes the story and characters richer, especially when Liam finds himself grappling with, say, a John who is literally more combative but is acting out a fantasy and not a prelude for another murder.
Yet what makes Phillips’ feature worth watching is the totality of his vision, flexing a clear knowledge of exploitation genres (and likely their Hollywood glow-ups) to satisfy an audience thirsty for blood while providing something deeper and more interesting. What will be exciting to see is if, and how, the filmmaker employs those skills as his canvases get larger — which they deserve to do. Given the variety of other films mentioned above, Anything That Moves might be mistaken as a description of the clearinghouse of references (or without knowing for sure, perhaps comparisons is a better word) elicited by the work of its writer-director. Really, it should underscore the good company in which Alex Phillips finds himself, and hint at the target that this film suggests he’s able to hit going forward in his career.
