Anything That Moves (2025) ‘Fantasia’ Movie Review: Alex Phillips’ Erotic Thriller Zigzags Pointlessly Sans Any Edge

In “Anything That Moves” (2025), the bike-strapping Liam (Hal Baum) zips through the city, servicing clients in his line of sex work. He has no qualms about his work, eyeing how to get the most out of his customers. Some of them, played by real-life adult performers, are giddy and desperate for him.

Liam just wings through the city. Through his free-wheeling exploration, we become intimately familiar with the seedy alleys, corners hiding a thrust of secrets and violence, and lust. The city surges within its concealed networks of cops and informers, each wanting to rat out on the accomplices, criminals, and targets. Liam straggles through its web of delusions and manipulations, every step a deceptive lure. He moves lightly, almost invisibly, his services amenable to clients even beyond the sexual. In fact, he works to fulfil their emotional lives, keep up a fantasy of complete, holistic affirmation. There’s so much he consciously sets about attempting to fix, while performing his sexual obligations to clients.

Phillips laces the film with a grimy, murky tone. The situations darken, and Liam remains oblivious. There are orchestrations at hand, and he doesn’t seem to be in the know of it. Everything hurles past him and he stays out of depth. Phillips isn’t quite able to sustain tension throughout. Instead, the film considerably deflates as he loses control. A rambling film works when there’s a clear, coherent vision. The jumpy energy tends to diffuse as the film chugs along. The visual spiritedness also spins out of focus, scrambled in the tepid mess of unresolved characters and their motivations. Where’s the edge? The film strains to be provocative and heady and intermittently menacing, but it tends to sputter out rather than gain steady momentum.

As a character too, Liam is woefully underwritten despite wielding a considerable presence, shadowing through much of the events. “Anything That Moves” comes off as paper-thin, never smooth or shrewd. Danger that should pop, raze through the surface borders on the lazy and reheated. What exacerbates matters is that there are no arresting secondary characters. Where’s the flare of precarity, the genuine erotic charge fuelling the litany of encounters?

Liam’s sexual adventures form the bulk of the film. He blends into dalliances with anyone, irrespective of gender and age brackets. Liam knows how to give people what they want, with no caveats. He makes everyone happy and satisfied. The film weaves among his encounters, spilling from the harmless to the ultimately twisted. Soon, everyone wants a piece of him, leaping to seize what he has to offer as pleasure. In his attempt to carnally appease all, he ends up horribly ensnared.

Though the film, shot on Super 16mm by Hunter Zimny, has a vividly disconcerting aesthetic edge and Justin Enoch’s immersive sound design, the film is way too unruly for its own good. It doesn’t know how to marshal its big burst of energy with lacerating impact. The film becomes scattershot and perfunctory in the name of pumping volatility and juddering chaos. It’s tough investing in a character as removed as Liam, despite the visceral intimacy of the larger design. Neither does he evoke any sympathy when he does land in a soup. The writing is too desultory and confused about how to position him, angle him within a matrix of social abscesses. What does work is the slant with which the makers approach sex. It becomes a revealing tool, slicing through power, shame, and assertion. There’s a complex business at play, interwoven with money, lust, and crime.

“Anything That Moves” wants to be a heady, potent cocktail, but it lacks certain strong elements required for the mix to spike the senses. Yes, it’s a rattling, circumlocutory experience, throwing perspectives askew and rendering characters ambiguous and veiled, but it doesn’t come together to a lashing effect. The foundations are too hollow to hold up a seedy carapace of deceit, double lives, and unravelling of sexual repression. The delicious erotic boundlessness embodied by its characters is undone by an overwhelming lethargy, rudderless impulse in the narrative. What could have blazed and prickled mostly purrs in “Anything That Moves.”

Anything That Moves premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival 2025.

Anything That Moves (2025) Movie Links: IMDb, MUBI, Letterboxd