The boxes keep arriving, nobody will admit to sending them, and the retailer says it is not their problem. That is the engine of Sender, the SXSW thriller Jamie Lee Curtis produced and appears in, and the film finally has a way into theaters. Dark Sky Films has taken U.S. rights and set a nationwide release for spring 2027.
Britt Lower plays Julia, newly sober and freshly out of a job, renting a house in the suburbs when the unordered packages start landing on her step. A blender. A corkscrew. Her signature shade of lipstick. Ordinary objects, picked by somebody who knows her, and the retailer will not take responsibility for any of it. Her sobriety is the first thing anyone questions once she starts saying out loud that she is being watched.
Russell Goldman wrote and directed. Sender is his first feature, and it follows Return to Sender, the horror short he made in 2022. The script landed on the 2023 Black List before the film existed. Worth keeping straight at the video store: Roger Christian’s The Sender, the 1982 psychic-patient chiller with Zeljko Ivanek and Shirley Knight, is a completely separate animal.
The Cast Is the Sell
Lower carries it, and the bench behind her is deep. Rhea Seehorn is in the neighborhood, as is David Dastmalchian, who has spent the last few years building a second career out of men who should not be trusted with a camera pointed at them. Anna Baryshnikov, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Edward Torres, Mike Mitchell and Alyssa Limperis round out the cast. Curtis appears in the film as well as producing it, alongside Molly Hallam and Jake Katofsky.
Four Jury Prizes Before a Distributor
Sender world premiered in SXSW’s Narrative Feature Competition in March and has been collecting Best Feature jury awards ever since: Sidewalk, Breck, Chattanooga, and the Portland Festival of Cinema, Animation and Technology. SFFILM gave it a Marquee Presentation slot. Beyond Fest has the Los Angeles premiere, the 59th Sitges Film Festival gives it an international debut on October 11 and 12, and Brooklyn Horror and FilmQuest are on the calendar too.
“What drew us to Sender was how confidently Russell takes a familiar anxiety and turns it into something completely unexpected,” Dark Sky Films EVP Greg Newman said in the announcement. Goldman kept it plainer: “The dream of any filmmaker is finding a distributor that understands your film and wants to put it in front of as many eyeballs as possible.”
Spring 2027 Is a Long Wait
A film that has been winning prizes since March will have spent well over a year on the circuit by the time it opens, which is a lot of word of mouth to keep alive on a teaser poster and a few stills. No exact date has been set and no trailer has been released. Dark Sky has the fall and winter to work out how much of the box to show.
