Film Review: BAGWORM: A Twisted and Funny Dark Comedy About a Warped Guy Who Can’t Catch a Break [SXSW 2026]

Bagworm Review

Bagworm (2026) Film Review from the 33rd Annual South by South West Film Festival, a movie directed by Oliver Bernsen, written by Henry Bernsen and starring Peter Falls, Michelle Ortiz, Robbie Arnett, Sydney Winbush, Bambina, Corbin Bernsen, Stephen Borrello, Amanda Corday, Jessy Morner Ritt and Linda Cushma.

Bagworm is the stuff midnight movie classics are made of. With dashes of Fight Club‘s Tyler Durden in him, the lead character of Oliver Bernsen’s new film, Carroll (Peter Falls), has that pathetic quality about him which makes one want to root for him at the film’s outset as he tries to find a nice girl to get intimate with. Carroll is a complex character with a lot of quirks that makes him easy to despise, but the film’s attempts to sympathize with him at given times sometimes hit the mark as the viewer could feel drawn to him in the earlier stages of the picture despite his many despicable qualities.

In Bagworm, Carroll finds himself on a date with Cassia (the likable Michelle Ortiz). She tries to be agreeable with Carroll and asks him if he likes fish, but there’s something rather “fishy” about Carroll, himself, who lives in a dilapidated home with walls ripped apart that looks like something which would give the place Tyler Durden squatted in during Fight Club a run for its money. Carroll is a salesman who eventually drives people around for extra cash. He steps on a nail early in the picture which impacts him significantly over the course of the movie. In a humorous moment, he obtains a chair which has disgusting human feces on the seat. The solution is to simply flip the seat over to the other side.

This film’s best scene, bar none, comes when a passenger he is driving around named Lou (Jessy Morner Ritt) takes an odd fascination with Carroll. She asks him how he’d kill her if he was a serial killer and his answer will frighten anyone in the audience even though it turns on Lou enough to want to go to his place and have sex with him. When he gets aggressive and bites her, it’s a creep out moment that will make audience members want to yell at the screen. Carroll finally gets what he wants and he squanders it due to stupidity.

An earlier scene has Carroll’s online picture analyzed by a date of his who recognizes that something from a different country than the one the picture was supposedly taken in is present in the photo. It’s like Carroll can’t get a break. In fact, his own friend, Teddy (Robbie Arnett), took Carroll’s original girlfriend from him. There’s a trip to Vegas, a drag queen with a vengeance and so much more to Bagworm which I’ll leave you to find out. This film’s American Psycho vibes (minus the wealth and the killings, for the most part) make Bagworm really interesting to behold. This is almost like the character from American Psycho if he were a poor man instead of a rich one.

This movie is smart to a fault. At one point, Carroll searches through a date’s phone to find out he was a bad lover. This movie starts to show a series of falling outs with reality that Carroll has due to his injury (from stepping on the nail) and does so in a fascinating way. Peter Falls delivers an excellent performance and Jessy Morner Ritt all but steals the show in her brief scenes within the movie. Ritt’s character wants to find something good and fun in her life and when she meets Carroll, it almost seems like a possibility until he unleashes his inner loser on her. Ritt is energetic and entertaining to watch.

While the filmmakers may want the viewer to understand the depth of Carroll’s suffering, Falls makes it so easy to understand the nature of his downfall, regardless of the director’s intentions. Carroll is infected due to stepping on the nail and the results of his downward spiral can be harrowing in this disturbingly watchable film. Falls never hits a false beat with his somber portrayal of a loner and a loser who can’t catch a break. Whether he remains that way at the film’s end, I’ll leave you to discover.

Bagworm slithers on the screen quite effectively and stings in its portrayal of loneliness and desperation. This film is well-directed and competently written, adding many scenes to the mix that will captivate and these sequences ultimately coalesce to form a somewhat coherent whole. There aren’t many flaws that aren’t typical of independent festival films. For example, the budgetary restraints do keep the movie from fulfilling its full potential. Still, I enjoyed Bagworm‘s portrait of a salesman on the edge who needs to keep moving from one bad event to another until something gives – for better or worse.

Rating: 7/10

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