The final day of movie-watching for me at SXSW 2025 finished with the premiere of the closing night film. After a week and change of slamming film after film, rib after rib, breakfast taco after breakfast taco, the handsome throwback romance On Swift Horses (B-) added a touch of Old Hollywood class to the end of the fest. Only, this take on a post-Korean War romance, in the burgeoning and modernizing West, gives the complex sexualities at its heart an admirable explicitness that the movies which inspired it simply never could.
An adaptation of Shannon Pufahl’s novel from prolific TV director Daniel Minahan and Lizzie writer Bryce Kass, On Swift Horses certainly feels literary—from the quiet depth of its pithy characters to the touching monologues to the “this made more sense on the page” big swings. Opening with the birth of what seems to be a love triangle between straitlaced couple Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Lee (Will Poulter), and Lee’s itinerant brother Julius (Jacob Elordi), the film immediately sets our expectations. This is a film intoxicated by horny possibility, with the rush of infatuation. Fire burns between Julies and Muriel from the first moment they meet, which also becomes the night she and Lee get engaged. There are no small moments in On Swift Horses. There are life-changing encounters, absurd coincidences, and countless suspensions of disbelief. Everyone, for example, has sexual tension with everyone else, at all times. Any new neighbor or casual acquaintance? There’s a decent chance there’ll be a stolen kiss or a seedy proposition.
This has the dual effect of supercharging the film with passion, and making it sometimes struggle to find its way back to reality. As Muriel and Julius go their separate ways, one to San Diego and the other to Las Vegas, they begin exploring more freely the lives that lie just underneath the ones they’ve been living. In laying out its queer love stories—during a time where subtle hints and loaded gestures could mean the difference between finding a connection or getting killed in an alley—On Swift Horses can lean too heavily on metaphors of gambling, chance, and possibility. The connections are clear through spot-on performances and rock-solid direction, but they only tug at the heartstrings when separated from the film’s more obvious writerly tics.
But when On Swift Horses can calm its source material down a bit, Minahan and cinematographer Luc Montpellier find glowing gold light and warm shadows for their couples to meet, judge one another, pursue, and come together. Julius runs into Henry (Diego Calva) at work in a casino; Muriel’s a magnet, but her butch neighbor Sandra (Sasha Calle) draws her in most deeply. That the two closeted, trepidatious white people find solace in more experienced Latino lovers, well…happily their relationships are handled with a groundedness that helps overcome the scattered cliches.
But the performances seal the deal. Calva is smooth, yet with the prickly self-preservation instincts of someone who’s had to learn things the hard way. Calle, though she can sometimes come off a bit too modern compared to everyone else’s more period turn, offers up some winning smarm. Edgar-Jones crafts her curious-turned-sneaky ingénue well, while Poulter falls apart exactly as needed. But it’s Elordi who turns in a movie star performance…and the movie star is James Dean.
Seriously, with the era, the loud leather jacket, the moody pursed lips, and the suppressed sexuality, Elordi’s character makes this movie scream Rebel Without A Cause. It might be a bit obvious, but it’s not unwelcome. And few actors would be nearly as believable doing something so close to Dean. Elordi and Edgar-Jones give On Swift Horses a solid core, and the expansive plotting—wrangled well by Minahan over various states and border lines—develops them out into characters worth caring (and crying) about, especially once you’ve come to terms with some of the cheesiness.
Though one would hope the closing night film of a festival would be worth seeing, one of the more pleasant surprises of SXSW 2025 is the cute, small-scale trans coming-of-age comedy She’s The He (B-). So sweet and bright that it almost feels like it was made for a much cooler version of Nickelodeon than currently exists, She’s The He sharply subverts the old conservative transphobic talking point trotted out by creeps: If people start getting to decide which bathroom they want to use, what’s to stop devious cis men from sneaking into the ladies’ room in order to get up to the nefarious deeds that they’re all just apparently one door sign away from committing? In filmmaker Siobhan McCarthy’s world, high school buddies Ethan (Misha Osherovich) and Alex (Nico Carney) go through this terrible thought process with unexpected results: Pretending to be trans makes Ethan realize that she actually is trans. Heartfelt hilarity ensues.
Led by a quiet, soft Osherovich and a brash, self-absorbed Carney—the latter a comedian who fully breaks out as a smarmy big-eyed chatterbox here—She’s The He is genderfucked from top to bottom in a delightful way. From the leads to the love interest (Tatiana Ringsby) to the jacked bully (Emmett Preciado) to the writer-director behind it all, the film is suffused with silly-sweet queerness. Sure, everyone’s swearing at each other and bursting with hormones; it’s a high school sex comedy, after all. But as Ethan begins discovering how she needs the world to see her, and as Alex learns to see outside himself, the feel-good narrative takes over from the more raunchy, in-your-face comedy and the doodle-inflected style. It’s still a simple and breezy film that wears on a bit considering how little is really going on under the hood, but it’s a refreshing and authentic comedy that’s talking to trans and cis kids alike in a language they’ll immediately recognize as their own.
Another sleeper that shouldn’t be missed brought home the documentary feature award at the fest: Shuffle (B). Filmmaker Benjamin Flaherty’s blistering, intimate takedown of the loopholes and leeches turning the already delicate recovery industry into an exploitation mill, Shuffle immediately situates itself as personal when Flaherty introduces himself as a recovering alcoholic. His easy rapport with his subjects, almost all of whom are in and out of recovery programs and sober homes themselves, is a testament to the trust he earned from them, and their desire to help him expose the capitalist cycle they’ve become trapped in.
Digging into the dark side of Obamacare’s change that allowed recovery to be covered by health insurance—and that extended insurance to many people who would not otherwise have it—Shuffle makes its case simply and sharply. Now incentivized to keep addicts on a steady pattern of recovery, relapse, and re-entry, some slimier recovery houses and detox facilities have inspired a shadowy network of cash-doling brokers to attract clientele. They run tests nobody needs, and have all but abandoned those actually hoping that these programs will help them change their lives. They just need those policies in hand, and those checks to clear. It’s hard to be surprised that another corner of the healthcare industry is so deeply corrupt, but Shuffle is too shocking to ignore. It’s harrowing stuff, made overwhelming by the tragedy Flaherty’s subjects experience along their journeys. It’s 81 damning minutes of tight filmmaking, great storytelling, and riveting investigation.
On a slightly lighter note, if you like Tim Robinson, you’ll like Friendship (B-). If you’re not fully immersed in I Think You Should Leave and Detroiters, the experience may more lucidly feel like rejected sketch ideas stretched out to feature length. It still might feel like that, at times, even if the comedy is entirely your speed. But throughout filmmaker Andrew DeYoung’s evil version of I Love You, Man, Robinson’s blend of abject absurdity, committed unpleasantness, and humble embrace of slapstick keeps the sporadic laughs coming.
The feature debut of TV comedy staple DeYoung, Friendship sees sad sack Craig (Robinson) run into his new neighbor Austin (Paul Rudd) by chance. Austin is charming and easygoing. Craig, wide-eyed, reacts like anyone would to discover their neighbor was as handsome as Paul Rudd. And he’s got a band. Stupid, sexy Austin. Their burgeoning relationship, which naturally involves some more ridiculous variations on the “relax and live a little” theme most Cool Movie Friends take, naturally develops into one-sided obsession. And, since Robinson—almost entirely dressed in shades of beige—is the obsessor, the intensity of emotion only ever doubles down, then doubles down again.
This all goes towards the vague stereotype of men not having normal ways to bond, with Craig’s awkwardness flying in the face of the film’s variously adjusted (but still intact) male friend groups which he is not a part of. It never adds up to anything particularly insightful, but it does build out its comedy logic in endearingly committed ways, with a few one-off gags—like a psychedelic toad experience that is perhaps my favorite drug trip ever committed to screen, or a cameo by Conner O’Malley—sprinkled in to keep things moving. But it all relies on the chemistry between the abrasive Robinson and the too-cool Rudd. Their dynamic, either playing off each other or playing with the idea of each other when they’re not sharing the screen, is strong, and DeYoung keeps them both contained to the right frequencies throughout the film. I certainly wish Kate Mara had more to do, or even to react to, as Craig’s wife, but she makes her moments count. And, for better or for (much, much) worse, Friendship is one for the boys.
