The Accountant 2 Leads A Misguided Early Batch Of Sxsw 2025 Features

The A.V. Club made its long-awaited return to Austin by hosting an interview house, but that doesn’t mean we’re not watching movies at SXSW 2025! It’s just that, so far at least, the films on offer are pretty underwhelming. Fitting with the festival’s vibe, most of the cinematic fare is rowdier, messier, and smaller-scale than anything at Sundance. A few front-and-center of the festival, though, like Another Simple Favor and The Accountant 2, are simply big, disappointing, Amazon-backed sequels.

The Accountant 2 (D) is much worse than Paul Feig’s return to twisty airport novel hijinks. Gavin O’Connor’s original was a meat-and-potatoes thriller with a bonkers side of ausploitation (autism, not Australia). Deeply stupid, yes, but charming in its own misguided way. The sequel places Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal in a sitcom episode surrounded by a Sound Of Freedom-style macho fantasy—call it Gun Sheldon. This film doubles down on its conviction that nobody should mock autism because autism allows you to be the most laudable thing an American blockbuster can imagine: a supersoldier.

Really, The Accountant 2 dreams up a world where a neuroscience clinic specializing in autism is actually just a front for an Xavier School For Gifted Youngsters where, rather than care, children are damned to lives as militarized members of a surveillance state, pulling off incredible feats of Movie Hacking and operating drones in order to facilitate extrajudicial killings. This is to say that the film does not handle neurodiversity with delicacy. Even the best parts of the film, the comedy (a genre which Accountant 2 clearly yearns to inhabit more fully), rely on perpetual literal-minded punchline Christian Wolff (Affleck). At least this time around, the buddy humor between Affleck’s even more restrained Christian and his swaggering brother Braxton (Bernthal) falls back on a simple odd-couple dynamic that makes the most of the actors’ rapport. But for every square-dancing or speed-dating scene, where Christian is a fish out of water, there are a dozen endless plodding plot points dragging the brothers around the world.

J.K. Simmons’ character from the first movie is gunned down in vague connection to a human trafficking ring, and The Accountant is the only one who can…solve his murder? Finish the investigation he was in the middle of? Fail to use his accounting skills for anything other than a party trick? The plot is a mess, the mystery is mud, and every moment where it’s not just Brax and Christian busting balls is excruciatingly confused. The Accountant 2 has all but discarded its basic premise and just wants to shoot as many people in the head as possible. Screenwriter Bill Dubuque now cares little for goofy logic puzzles or ludicrous secrets squirreled away in tax documents; he wants an action franchise, damn it, and human traffickers are the flavor of the week. So, Christian drives his big camper o’ weapons across a national border without a care in the world, seeking sub-Michael Bay gunfights that flatten The Accountant into generic run-and-gun action slop. I’d much prefer the 22-minutes-with-commercials version of this than the bloated two-hour blockbuster The Accountant 2 strains itself to be. 

On the other end of the spectrum in terms of scale, though, is Fucktoys (C), a perfect encapsulation of SXSW’s oddball spirit. A raunchy calling-card comedy from debut writer, director, and star Annapurna Sriram, the film first feints at being a modernized John Waters-esque bad-taste romp before sliding into various deep ends as a satirical sex work comedy. AP (Sriram) is dirt poor and literally cursed. That’s what not one, but three psychics convey over the course of Fucktoys, and what keeps vaguely driving her pursuit of cash. That means sleeping with regular johns, setting her friend up with a celebrity client, working a coke-fueled sex party, and, eventually, finding a private patron who seems to be the answer to all her prayers.

Though Fucktoys’ subject matter begins as boldly as its title—with a ridiculous psychic reading in the middle of the swamp and a kinky old man getting pissed on in a bathtub—its laughs rely on shock value; there’s nothing especially cartoonish or satirical about the bodily fluids, fistfight violence, or sexual demands. Rather than descending into Waters lunacy, the more lurid elements are handled with an offhanded Adult Swim explicitness, which (along with its self-satisfied atmosphere) undermines anything that might actually be excitingly out-of-bounds. 

Unlike basically every other comedy, though, the humor actually pales in comparison to how good this movie looks. Sriram and her cinematographer Cory Fraiman-Lott are conspicuously thoughtful about giving Fucktoys a bit more visual class than many of its contemporaries. A warm film grain adds a throwback atmosphere to AP’s moped jaunts around her Florida-coded Trashtown, populated by Hazmat-suited oddballs and flashes of technical style. Though the journey eventually swaps its gonzo goofiness for equally light jabs at movie stars and Nice Guys, neither approach is especially strong and the split dilutes both efforts. A midnight movie should lean all the way in until it falls over into an explosion of gore or a gaping-wide orifice. But Fucktoys’ energy and its surprisingly diverse showcase of visual talent should make it a great proof of concept for when Sriram starts shopping around her next film.

Another first feature at the fest is American Sweatshop (C-), a film obsessed with the darkness proliferating on every screen connected to the internet. Lili Reinhart’s Daisy works for a moderation company—sitting in a large call center-like room, scrolling through a cursed feed of heinous reported social media videos to determine which truly deserve removal—until she finally comes across something so nasty she can’t get out of her mind. The first stumbling block for this premise is the idea that this video has to be one step more evil and disturbing than the deluge of animal torture, graphic suicides, and other violences that American Sweatshop teases just off-screen.

The video in question, well, it’s got nothing on something like the snuff film at the heart of last year’s indie horror phenom Red Rooms, a film concerned with our increasing addiction to (upsetting) content that actually has some bite. Fittingly, Daisy’s coworkers, boss (whom Christiane Paul plays as a villainous caricature)—even casual acquaintances and the police—don’t see what’s so bad. Sure, it’s a horrible video of unspeakable violence. But that’s the internet for you. This already takes a little bit of the pep from American Sweatshop’s paranoid step: Instead of putting the audience on Daisy’s side, facing an uncaring world with increasing dread and anxiety, it sets us at a distance from her, wondering why this time, why this video, and why any of these people are working for this company in the first place. Longtime cinematographer and TV director Uta Briesewitz makes her feature debut here with flashy work that overdoes it to compensate for Matthew Nemeth’s ho-hum script, which never quite reaches the class or technological critiques it would need for its more heightened thriller elements to connect. Instead, the toothless film moves through the beats of its admittedly compelling premise mechanically.

Reinhart, for her part, sells both a worker too caring for the job and a person who’s taken in so  much cruelty that her own is only barely contained under her skin. She bends well, but it’s her breaking that Reinhart relishes. Supporting her, Daniela Melchior provides a bit of comic relief while the rest of the cast flounders in a film world that never feels fully thought out. Since American Sweatshop splits its time between Daisy’s growing obsession with finding the origins of the video that she can’t shake, her stunted personal life, and her co-workers’ increasingly self-destructive coping methods for having a mentally torturous job, it feels like it’s casually swiping through its themes—never coalescing into a feed as unsettling as the real thing.

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