Our Effed Up World

The seventh feature film to date by young Australian director Alice Maio Mackay, Our Effed Up World is relatively slight, and might at first glance seem less significant than her other works. Part of this, however, is due to how smoothly it slips down, because the overall quality of her work is improving all the time. Like last year’s The Serpent’s Skin, this is professionally edited, and it also has a notably tighter script. During shooting, Mackay has focused far more on drawing out good work from her actors, and less on gimmicks.

This doesn’t mean that the low budget charm of her early films is altogether lost. The alien effects on display here make early Doctor Who look like high art. There are similarities in aspects of the plot to James Cameron’s Aliens, but here the special effects have been constructed using packaging materials. Mackay’s point seems to be not unlike that made by Lars Von Trier when he shot Dogville on an empty sound stage. It doesn’t matter if you remain conscious that you’re watching a film so long as you’re able to engage with the story, the characters and what it has to say.

In this case, the story revolves around Sheri (Sara Thompson), a young woman raised by her astronomer father and her grandmother who has been hard hit by the recent death of the latter. Like many young people, she’s angry with her father for burying himself in his work (as he tried to support the family) and not being present enough for her. This is tangled up with frustration at his apparent apathy about the things that they agree are wrong with the world. She believes in taking action. He’s busy watching the stars, something which has always made her uncomfortable . It will take the invasion of the aforementioned aliens to enable her to see him in a different light.

Whilst Alice’s early films were full of understandable anger about the mistreatment of trans people, this film sees those concerns nudged to the sidelines. This doesn’t mean that they have been forgotten; rather, the rage has been replaced by a determination simply to show viewers the world as she experiences it, which has the effect of normalising trans and non-binary people in a way that those more direct works never could. By focusing on the mixed group of friends who help Sheri and her dad take on the aliens, she also emphasises how little importance many young people attach to gender history (or, for that matter, to race). Whilst the characters are distinctive and sometimes get on each other’s nerves, the warmth of the friendship between them makes them fun to be around and gives viewers an additional reason to care about the fates of individuals.

This doesn’t mean that the film shows us only sweetness and light. Aside from the battle with the aliens – much of which takes place in the very Mackay-esque setting of a video store – it also contains one of the most ruthless break-ups in recent cinematic history, with a scene in which Sheri dumps her boyfriend (Jordan Dulieu) just getting funnier and funnier as she shreds his psyche into tiny little bits. He is not an unsympathetic character, and most viewers will feel for him, but that does little to reduce the thrill of listening to a speech which anyone who has ever been stuck in a disappointing relationship will wish they’d had the gumption to deliver. After that, it’s hard to believe that the aliens could stand a chance.

Beautifully paced, the film has the neat structure of a fairy tale, ending with a scene which, queerness aside, wouldn’t be out of place in Disney. If Mackay can build on this and strengthen her stories too, all that early promise is likely to pay off even better than expected.

Reviewed on: 28 Aug 2026