Fantasia Review: ANYTHING THAT MOVES Goes Both Ways

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innocuous jealousy scenario with a client, he turns up dead from a particularly grisly lobotomy where his brain has been replaced by cash that’s been decorated with images of genitalia.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