Russell Goldman on the Paranoia and Personal Identity of 'Sender'

Russell Goldman and I find common ground quickly. We bond over the years we spent writing before either of us figured out what our own voice actually sounded like, the freelance work, the bylines, the pieces that belonged to someone else's idea of what criticism should be. The work had a shape that was easy to inhabit and slowly suffocating. You learned to write toward the algorithm, to sand down your instincts until the copy was clean and accessible and could have been written by anyone. "I wrote reviews growing up that told the reader next to nothing about myself or what inspires me," Goldman says. 

He grew up on IMDb boards and Box Office Mojo forums watching film culture organize itself around something he found antithetical to art. "Things have to be universally beloved, or liked, and also financially successful, as if that means it's good," he says. The critics he now admires most are those whose work is irreducibly theirs, where you know exactly who is on the other side of the page. He mentions David Ehrlich, Angelica Jade Bastién, and Adam Nayman— all writers whose identity and criticism are so inextricably linked that reading one review tells you everything about how they see the world. He read them and understood what he was working toward, which was foundational to his understanding of the camera.

One of his early jobs was supporting Jamie Lee Curtis in a project she was writing called Mother Nature. Goldman was working with Curtis to honor the outline she had brought while finding ways to make it his own. He talks about it with genuine respect for what collaboration actually demands. Curtis eventually gave him a co-author credit, recognizing that something of himself had come forward in the work. It was a generous thing for her to do, and it clarified something for Goldman: "Your own identity is so important to the art that you put out into the world," he says. 

Sender, his debut feature, is the fullest expression of his understanding of identity so far. It succeeds a series of shorts he’s made, including Return to Sender, the 2022 short film the feature is loosely based on. The film stars Britt Lower as Julia, a recently sober woman who starts receiving packages she never ordered, each one uncannily personal, each one tightening the paranoid spiral she is already living inside. Her sister Tat (Anna Baryshnikov) has moved in with her. A delivery driver named Charlie (David Dastmalchian) keeps arriving with the boxes and slowly becomes the closest thing she has to a tether to reality. Rhea Seehorn plays an ex-sponsor whose patience has run out, and Jamie Lee Curtis opens the film in a prologue that suggests Julia is not the only person on the receiving end of whatever this is. Curtis came on as a producer through her Comet Pictures banner, and the rest of the cast followed. A debut with a cast this size has the potential to sand the filmmaker down but Goldman went the other way. The bigger the room got, the more of himself he put into the film.

Goldman didn't fully realize how much of himself was in it until the footage was captured. The addiction narrative was inspired by his experiences growing up; although not his own addiction, it was near enough to it that he understood its texture from the inside. The jittery obsessive rhythms were entirely his. He lives with OCD, which he maps with the precision of someone who has had to study their own traps carefully to move through the day. Following a string of car accidents just before the pandemic, he developed PTSD from the concussive symptoms. Any time his head grazes a surface, he finds himself tapping the back of it ten times to register what the impact felt like, the ritual completing itself before his rational brain can intervene. "There is something incredibly attractive to people with OCD about an impulsive thing that can just suck them in," he says. Julia's refusal to stop, the way she stays on the line even when her body is revolting against her, he recognizes all of it without having to look hard. His wife watched the dailies and told him Britt Lower was walking like him. He laughed it off. A friend said the same thing at a test screening. He stopped laughing. "Okay," he says, "that might actually be somewhat true."

The only way out of the loop is through the people he’s learned to love. His wife Victoria Alejandro reminds him of this in his worst moments. "As soon as you become a supporter of that story," he says, "as soon as you are engaging with your loved ones and seeing what they may need, you're stepping outside of yourself." Alejandro is also his co-producer, present through every draft of Sender, in the sound mix, in the edit room, the person who first noticed Lower walking like him. His friend Thomas Grabinski was brought on as a producer late in prep because “we see every movie together.” Their taste is so aligned that having his voice in the room felt like a necessary condition for trusting his own. "We would get excited by the same things," Goldman says. Sender shares various collaborators that date back from the original short who have worked with Goldman since, including his producer Jake Katofsky, his editor Marco Rosas and his assistant director Jessica Dho. “Make shit with the people that you trust, as much as possible,” says Goldman. “Respect them, praise them, try to give them opportunity. It’s the only thing I’ve learned that works. I haven’t always followed that mantra the way I should but I try to live by it now more than ever. Because it makes the actual work experience feel like something worth coming back to. And eventually the microcosm of your group is gonna make something that will pop, because you guys are able to start operating on a different level."

Goldman finds a lot of inspiration in Brian De Palma's 1974 cult musical Phantom of the Paradise. Goldman made everyone who worked on his college thesis film watch it before production. He mentions a shot he thinks about constantly, where the same song gets ruthlessly repackaged into country, R&B, whatever the market demands next, some man in a suit deciding what music should become. "Almost like an algorithm," Goldman says. He has watched the same logic flatten contemporary film culture into something he finds corrosive. He points to films that advertise a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score only from a specific date, before the consensus shifted. "Which in my opinion is irrelevant to the quality of the movie." What the optimization produces, he says, is films designed to land somewhere in the comfortable middle, critic-proof and inoffensive. "There's a hope to aim for the 6 or 7 out of 10, where the ceiling might not be terribly high, but the floor is just barely high enough to get by." He understands why Phantom of the Paradise got buried on release. "It's a curio even in De Palma's filmography. It doesn't feel anything he’s made before or since." Critics have struggled to find a clean shelf for Sender too. Reviewers have called it a fever dream, a fantasia of paranoia, a quirky psycho-thriller, a wildly ambitious and beautifully bizarre debut. Goldman admires Phantom of the Paradise’s confidence and singularity. He respects a film that knows exactly what it is even when the world doesn't have a category for it yet.

The harder thing to refuse is the version of himself that would have made the safer film. "You almost mitigate your own challenges before you embark on them," he says, alluding to situations where you pre-empt your own risk before you've even taken it.  There’s a world where a safer and cleaner version of Sender exists, but Goldman committed to bravery. He kept the fantasia, kept the prologue, kept the parts that don't reconcile, and trusted the audience to meet him there. The film is harder to shelve because of it, and harder to dismiss. Goldman has traded the safety of mass appeal for his obsession with the films that taught him about art. "There's nothing I want more than to tell the filmmakers I revere what their work means to me," he says. "Phantom of the Paradise meant the world to me. Safe meant the world to me. They influenced the trajectory of my life and the things I want to make. If Sender is that for one person, then it was worth all of it." He wants to keep making things for those people. I am proud to be one of them, and Goldman got away with something truly personal. The people who find it will know exactly what he means.