At SXSW, Death Is Never The End

Is death really so final? Or is there something that comes after life?

That’s a question that many of the genre films at this year’s SXSW Film & TV Festival explored — with a few outliers like Slanted and It Ends, which dealt with bigger questions of identity and existence. But still, it seemed a prevailing pattern at this year’s festival and one that found more shades and nuances with each film. Though not every film was successful at asking this question, they still gave us something to ponder, as we squirmed through undead horror films and parasitic creature-features.

Here are some of the best, and worst, genre movies we saw at the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival.

Dead Lover

Black box theater gets an experimental and macabre spin in Dead Lover, Grace Glowicki’s undead thriller that made a splash with both the Sundance and SXSW Midnight crowd. Grace Glowicki stars as a stinky gravedigger looking for love — and she says as much to the camera, which she frequently addresses. When she finally finds her soulmate in a foppish dandy (Ben Petrie) mourning the loss of his sister (Leah Doz), they immediately fall into a frenzied affair — until he drowns at sea. Left with only his severed finger, the gravedigger decides to revive him with the body of his dead sister, leading to explosively sickening, and wildly funny, results.

Dead Lover is an inventive and charmingly shaggy Frankenstein reiff, painting a strange, oddball world out of its bare soundstage and ensemble of four actors. But as endearing as its DIY approach is, Dead Lover quickly finds the limits of its black box and never succeeds in transcending it.

Dead Lover premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24 before premiering at the SXSW Film & TV Festival on March 9. It has been acquired by distributor Cartuna x Dweck but has no set release date.

It Ends

It’s the last day of college, and four longtime friends (Phinehas Yoon, Noah Toth, Akira Jackson, Mitchell Cole) have crowded into a car to help move one of them out of their dorm. But a wrong turn takes them on a strange road that seems to have no end — when they turn around, they come to a dead end, and when they stop, well, that’s the most frightening part. As they peer out into the deep woods that surround the road, they see a horde of screaming people running towards them. Frightened, they take off, finding that whenever they pause their car, the horde will follow. The gang is left no choice but to continue driving, all the while questioning what landed them here. Are they dead? Is this purgatory? A curse? A dream? As they ponder these question, they begin to probe their own relationships and their own true wants and goals.

A brilliant and thought-provoking Gen Z riff on Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, It Ends is a singular road-trip thriller that interrogates contemporary social anxieties and thorny friendships. It’s funny and lived-in, with its core four proving to be endlessly watchable and relatable, while also probing deeper questions about the next generation’s place in the world. One of the best films — genre or not — at SXSW this year, It Ends sends its characters, and audience, into an existential tailspin.

It Ends premiered March 7 at the SXSW Film & TV Festival. It does not yet have a distributor or release date.

Slanted

It’s not totally surprising to see why Slanted, Amy Wang’s ambitious feature debut, won the SXSW Grand Jury Award for Narrative Feature. A scathing social satire modeled after Get Out and all its successors, Slanted attempts to unpack the messiness of Asian-American identity and its closeness to whiteness. And it almost succeeds.

In Slanted, Joan Huang (Shirly Chen) has always idolized the American beauty ideal: the tall, blonde, white Prom Queen, for whom life will always be easy. When she’s offered the chance to undergo an experimental trans-racial surgery, she immediately jumps on it and becomes everything she ever dreamed of: a white girl (McKenna Grace) who instantly becomes one of the most popular girls in school.

It’s a strong idea undercut by clumsy and heavy-handed execution. Slanted’s depiction of Asian-American identity and self-hatred is flimsy at best, while its social satire — white people don’t like seasoning! — was already feeling old by the time Fresh Off the Boat debuted on ABC 10 years ago. Despite its aspirations, Slanted is by no means the Asian answer Get Out.

Slanted premiered March 10 at the SXSW Film & TV Festival. It does yet not have a distributor or release date.

The Surrender

A disturbing domestic drama takes a turn for the satanic in The Surrender, writer-director Julia Max’s excellent horror film about grief (and just one of many movies this fest about trying to bring back the dead). The Surrender follows an estranged daughter, Megan (The Boys’ Colby Minifie), and her mother Barbara (Grey's Anatomy’s Kate Burton), who are brought back together over the deathbed of Megan’s father, Robert. Barbara has been caring for the terminally ill Robert, but when he finally passes, she has a shocking plan in place: she’s hired a stranger to help resurrect her dead husband. Megan is at first reluctant to indulge Barbara’s new-age whims but eventually agrees to participate in the strange ritual. After all, what’s the harm in a little voodoo?

A lot, it turns out. The Surrender quickly takes a horrific turn, with a demonic force invading the ritual. Max uses an equally heavy hand with both the domestic drama and the gore, spilling plenty of blood and viscera but also treating Megan and Barbara’s grief with a great deal of empathy. Scary, squirm-inducing, and sympathetic all at once, Surrender is another great entry in the “trauma horror” subgenre.

The Surrender premiered March 9 at the SXSW Film & TV Festival. It will be released by Shudder on May 23.

The True Beauty of Being Bitten By a Tick

The True Beauty of Being Bitten By a Tick tries its hand at the “wellness horror” trend that’s starting to take hold (think Nine Perfect Strangers and its ilk), but all of its preaching about self-care feels strangely hollow. Directed by Peter Oh, Tick stars Zoe Chao as a grieving young woman who escapes the city to stay with her friend’s new rustic upstate home. But she finds herself sharing the place with two other strangers who push local homemade meals on her zen mindsets. When a tick bite appears to swell and grow infected, she begins to feel herself transforming — and she won’t be able to change back.

The True Beauty of Being Bitten By a Tick is half-baked satire at its finest, more practiced in the aesthetic of social horror than it is in developing any fully-formed ideas about wellness or self-care. It might’ve been a competent horror short story, but as a feature film, it leaves a lot to be desired.

The True Beauty of Being Bitten By a Tick premiered March 7 at the SXSW Film & TV Festival. It does not yet have a distributor or release date.