APPOFENIACS Review | Fantastic Fest 2025

The below review is part of my 2025 Fantastic Fest coverage. Be sure to stay tuned throughout the week for more reviews!

There's very little new to say so far as warnings about A.I. and deepfakes are concerned, but Chris Marrs Piliero’s Appofeniacs isn't too worried about saying anything new so far as it's highlighting an ongoing problem with the technology in both spectacular and absurd fashion. 

Several groups of strangers are brought "together" throughout the course of the story, with their sole common denominator being that there's some miserable little dweeb named Duke (Aaron Holliday) who wants to ruin their lives for varying reasons. You see, Duke has a chip on his shoulder, and a handy dandy app that allows him to make anyone say and do whatever he wants on video with very little effort. He also happens to owe someone a hearty amount of money, which isn't doing anyone any favors so far as that shoulder chip is concerned. 

So far as antagonists are concerned, Duke is interesting largely because each motive varies from the last. He's a weak little weasel, bringing nothing to the world around him but expecting that it owes him everything. It's not typically the type of character that I enjoy, but Holliday’s performance and Piliero’s script do just enough to keep him engaging with his decision to attack one person being that he was bored while his targeting of another is because he feels jilted and another still being his own personal desperation. A lazy comparison would be the Joker, but it's most certainly not that deep. Fella just feels owed and likes playing god because he's never amounted to anything.

Appofeniac's character lineup runs the gamut of personalities, ranging from a complicated cosplaying couple with the kind of open relationship that only one party is really participating in but hey, the other likes to watch to a perfectly normal weed dealer who stands up for a barista and pays the price, but it all ultimately revolves around Sean Gunn's Clinto Binto. Binto's a cosplay designer who prides himself in creating "real" cosplays, allowing his clients to "truly become the character they seek to embody. Which really just means that the weapons he makes are very real and, yes that does, in fact, come into play later in the film. 

Binto also connects to each character in his own right, but more in a hero worship kind of way until you get to the final act. Legend to some parties and close friend to others, he doesn't appear until pretty far along in the film despite being first billed. 

Though it's not to Appofeniacs' detriment that Gunn isn't a key player all throughout, the film does suffer from some disconnect. While it's not technically an anthology, it very much features individual stories that only cross paths tertiarily. Perhaps the easiest way to describe it is as a Tarantino-lite kind of story that has quite a long way to go before it becomes the stuff of legend.

Still, I appreciate the film's method of highlighting the dangers of A.I. and the cost of creating even the most innocuous of deepfakes. While, as mentioned, it's not really bringing up anything new, its use of absurdity works. That's particularly true of the way it builds to its finale. There are plenty of deaths in Appofeniacs, but they build throughout the film until hitting the final crescendo in Binto's home where the guts and gore can be showcased in all of their glory (and with fun weapons to boot).

While I most certainly appreciate the film's intent and several fun performances from the likes of Will Brandt’s Texas Tim and Simran Jehani’s Poppy, it does suffer from "everyone making the stupidest decision possible" syndrome and a whisper of an ending unbeffiting of the film's final confrontation. I don't mind an ambiguous ending, provided such an ending feels earned. Here, though, the story mostly just fizzles out rather than actually ends. You know when you watch a big franchise film that is so certain it's going to get a sequel and has no interest in being contained? It kind of feels like that. There is a way that ambiguity could work for the film, and why the creators chose to end it the way they did is evident, the execution of it just doesn't really work. 

Verdict

Appofeniacs' fun ensemble and absurdist nature does just enough to give it a passing grade, but it definitely could have benefited from stronger cohesion and a more engaging conclusion.

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