Hal Baum and Ginner Lynn Allen star in the dark psychosexual thriller Anything that Moves. Playing at Fantasia Film Festival 2025.
Anything that Moves is the kind of thriller that audiences could find by the binful at video stores selling previously viewed VHS. The spicy genre entry would have been right at home at 1:00 am, right after a showing of Animal Instincts (1, 2, or 3… take your pick) on Cinemax. Those kinds of erotic thrillers have gone the way of the dodo. Writer/director Alex Phillips has not only brought them back to life but has given them an update that feels apropos to 2025.
Sex Worker Liam (Hal Baum) uses his bike and whole messenger aesthetic to bring pleasure to all of his clientele. Liam, be it man or woman or both, depending on the call, is more than happy to play for pay. The in-demand Liam finds himself embroiled in a series of grisly murders that point to his fellow sex worker girlfriend trying to pin the murders on him. Crooked cops, Courthouse clients, and the late-night back alleys of Chicago all play a part in what could be Liam’s demise.
Make no mistake Anything that Moves does not shy away from nudity or depiction of sex in all of its forms. Phillip’s film, lensed in 16mm by Hunter Zimny, is beautiful in its depiction of the sweaty grime of the hot summer nights Liam and the sex workers of Chicago do their business. Though the film never looks at the business of sex work as seedy, something that it feels a kinship to Anora and its transactional relationships.
There’s a compassion to the way that Phillips portrays not just sex but the men and women who pay Liam and his fellow workers. It’s these relationships and scenes that elevate Anything that Moves beyond your typical psychosexual thriller. It is those scenes of compassion that allow the film’s violence to be so shocking. The counterpoint that Phillips’ script adroitly balances allows for a film that gets tenser by the minute as one begins to wonder if Liam is going to make it out alive.
Anything that Moves shines in its third act, giving us a truly wonderful bent on the genre conventions of the psychosexual thriller. It’s in these moments that you realize just what a great filmmaker Alex Phillips is. Taking a genre that has been stale and dead for close to thirty years and revitalizing and modernizing it for our times.