Crash-out cinema is back. Last year’s Oscar hopefuls—among them Marty Supreme and If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You—mined considerable zest by running their leads through the absolute wringer. Their raison d’être seemed, at times, to be seeing just how much their respective protagonists were willing to endure before breaking. They also, not incidentally, featured largely likeable, or at least tolerable, leads. Not so in Oliver Bernsen’s Bagworm. Carroll (Peter Falls) is an absolute cad, but that never stops his hallucinatory spiral from being a wickedly fun delight.
Carroll’s bleeding-heart liberalism is a mask for paranoia. He’s convinced the world is ending, and no one cares as much as he does. He’s special that way, spending evenings enraptured by YouTube rabbit holes about rural Indian labor abuses, spinning those cataclysmic yarns for anyone kind enough to listen. Patience wears thin, especially when intersected with Carroll’s basest need—sex.
First dates end disastrously, either because a date is a little too curious about his (conspicuously) photoshopped profile pictures or, God forbid, ordered the fish. His breakdown regarding the latter is uncomfortable yet stirring, an early augur for the kind of value-based chaos Carroll incites everywhere he goes.
He’s a horny guy who can’t catch a break, and the only obstacle in the way is him, though any hope for redemption is lost when, cigarette in mouth on a vinyl chair (full Hillbilly Elegy mode), he stands and steps on a rusty nail. There was the thinnest veneer of stability beforehand (Bagworm opens with a pulsating, slimy… something), less so as Carroll’s wound bubbles and infects his entire body. Is it tetanus, or does Carroll really know something we don’t?
If it sounds uniquely existential, it is, though never distractingly so. The contextual doom and gloom—and the regular cuts to a decaying world reminiscent of Cronenberg’s Spider—is really in service of Carroll’s inability to simply get things right. He abusively accosts dates, buys the nastiest chair I’ve ever seen, and rear-ends leading cars when he’s got rideshare passengers in the backseat. He’s pissed with his friends, his job, the world, and—really—everyone who seems to have it better than him.
It’s potent commentary. Of course, someone like Carroll would project outward, presuming there’s a larger scheme at work, some kind of universal conspiracy against him that only he can see, than recognize that, well… people just don’t like him because he kinda (really) sucks.
Falls sells the hell out of it. It’s a remarkable, line-toing performance, and it never slips into caricature. Carroll is the worst, though Falls keeps us rooting, however small, that he’ll pull it all together. His journey is punctuated by Nicholas Nazmi’s propulsive, hypnotic editing and Ari Balouzian’s somber score. Writer Henry Bernsen keeps things light, confronting uncomfortable truths with enough winking, surreal (and horror-tinged) irony to keep Bagworm from succumbing under the weight of its gargantuan genre ambitions.
Bagworm is great stuff. Funny stuff. Heady stuff. It’s body horror by way of Curb Your Enthusiasm. And it’s exactly as unhinged and compulsively watchable as it sounds. It’s an early win for SXSW, and a signal to keep an eye on all talent involved.
Bagworm premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas, on March 13, 2026
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