Australian writer-director Alice Maio Mackay is not quite 22 years old, and now has seven feature-length productions under her belt. But there’s often a downside to being a wunderkind, as anyone from Orson Welles to Xavier Dolan could tell you. As the work draws greater acclaim, it can become harder for an artist to trust their instincts and continue pushing in new directions. Mackay’s latest, Our Effed Up World, is by no means a perfect film. But when we look back on her career in the future, it will undoubtedly be seen as a transitional work, a bridge between her brash B-grade monster movies and a new level of maturity.
Following her breakthrough film, 2023’s T Blockers, Mackay seemed to double down on the campy genre pictures, until the relative seriousness of last year’s The Serpent’s Skin (released theatrically in 2026). Guided by a pair of charismatic lead performances by Alexandra McVicker and filmmaker Avalon Fast, Serpent’s Skin was essentially a love story between two lost souls, complicated by the presence of a predatory demon. Our Effed Up World goes even further in pushing the genre material into the background. Yes, there is an alien lifeform that caught a ride on a meteor and is consuming various young Australians, but there’s a level of dramatic seriousness at work that suggests that Mackay is interested in making movies about human relationships, with supernatural beings serving as plot complications and not the main attraction.
Sheri (Sara Thompson) is a young woman raised by her astronomer father Hank (Scott Major). The film opens during a meteor shower, and we learn that Sheri has a fear of meteors and other such otherworldly detritus entering our atmosphere. This “astrophobia” is a key to the true heart of the story, which is Sheri’s conflicted relationship with her dad. A researcher and academic, Hank tends to lose himself in his work, and while his love for Sheri is never in doubt, she sees him as too passive. This father-daughter conflict reflects new dramatic territory for Mackay, and allows her to continue her ongoing interrogation of gender in a slightly different way. While gender nonconformity is a given among Sheri and her friends — including nonbinary video store owner Finn (Jess McLeod) — young people can sometimes place unfair, normative expectations on the previous generation, reflexively wanting a father to “act like a man” without interrogating just what that might mean.
Shortly after Sheri breaks up with her himbo boyfriend Harry (Jordan Dulieu), he goes missing. We soon discover that he is the first victim of a predatory alien that takes on the characteristics of the humanoids it consumes. Sheri, Hank, Finn, and Sheri’s best friend Poppy (Annapurna Sriram) all join forces to slay the monster, and do so in short order. In fact, the alien angle is strikingly underdeveloped, as if Mackay felt obliged to adhere to the genre brief even as her true interests lay elsewhere.
Above all, Our Effed Up World is a character study of Sheri, a woman navigating various forms of loss. Her mother died when she was young, and recently her grandmother (Kerry Armstrong) succumbed to cancer. Her breakup with Harry, although seemingly justified, shows that Sheri keeps others at arm’s length, and as the film progresses, we discover that she is defined by a nihilistic streak. Where the idealistic Poppy insists that they must fight to save humanity, Sheri is ambivalent at best. In the end, Mackay seems to ratify Poppy’s sincere commitment to the future over Sheri’s detachment. At its core, then, this is a film about what we are expected to do (or not do) on behalf of the effed-up world of the title. And on a meta-narrative level, one gets a clear sense that Mackay herself is working to free herself of the strictures of camp-horror and wholeheartedly embrace humanity, even when it may not seem to deserve it.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2026 — Dispatch 1.
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