Film Review: SPARKS: An Aimless Movie with Big Ideas That Never Really Gel Despite Promise [SXSW 2026]

Sparks Review

Sparks (2026) Film Review from the 33rd Annual South By South West Film Festival, a movie written and directed by Fergus Campbell and starring Thomas Deen Baker, Julia D’Angelo, Elsie Fisher, Charlie B. Foster, Madison Hu, Denny McAuliffe and Simon Downes Toney.

Filmmaker Fergus Campbell’s new indie picture, Sparks, has a style all its own. It is welcome to keep its signature style for other viewers to enjoy, but the film is easier to be seen by most audiences as a meandering mess. If one is looking at the structure of the story line (which is being told on possibly one of the lowest budgets possible), one can determine that this movie needed a much stronger script and a much more substantial budget. As it is, it’s full of interesting ideas that never work like they intend to.

Set in Nevada, Sparks has a hook to lure audiences in and it’s the concept of time travel. Unfortunately, by the time the movie really digs into this provocative subject matter, there’s barely 15-minutes of the movie left to behold. Cleo (Elsie Fisher) is the most interesting character out of the seven main ones the film introduces to the audience at the beginning. She’s really into filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. Odette (the solid Madison Hu) and Cleo see the other teens who regularly gather around a reservoir which shapes the movie’s themes and brings them together in a somewhat haphazard way.

One scene here has one or more of our characters encounter a group of very odd men who seem to have the ability to time travel. These men look creepy and the weirdness of this scene is outdone by a sequence where a gun is drawn and we see a close up of another guy’s face who just doesn’t seem to fit in right in the world this movie initially sets. Sparks builds its creative world carefully, but then destroys the picture’s unique landscape that it sets up with ridiculous, artsy scenes that don’t advance the plot enough to warrant their bizarre nature.

Cleo wants to get to 1960’s Paris to fulfill her deepest desires. This film doesn’t have the budget to do what it could ideally do with this idea, but the last ten minutes are wildly different and will keep audiences intrigued, especially if they don’t know the movie is about to come to a very abrupt ending. I love the idea of the drive-in movie theater that brings our circle of characters together at times. It’s another thread that could have been expanded upon to create a more substantial film if it had a bigger budget.

Reviewing the film that was able to be made, however, there are pluses in the mix. This movie is definitely all style. The characters played by everyone else in the cast (namely Thomas Deen Baker, Julia D’Angelo, Charlie B. Foster as Cleo’s love interest, Denny McAuliffe and Simon Downes Toney), have distinct and developed personalities that will make them easy to pigeonhole into specific types of people. The film pushes the envelope with repeated scenes of characters giving and receiving oral sex, though. This movie is smarter than it appears to be, but wastes precious time with moments meant to shock rather than provoke intense thought like the later scenes in the picture truly do.

This film loves the movies, and for that, I can’t hate it. Clark Gable, a vending machine dispersing books and so many other pieces of the story line are distinct stamps the movie makes on the audience and it’s hard to stop thinking about the movie after it’s over and wonder what will happen to the characters after the end credits roll. If one comes to this movie with their own imagination, one could probably imagine the events that the movie hints at rather than shows. This movie tells us a lot, but only shows a little. That makes it a disappointment in the final analysis, though.

Time travel movies are typically hit or miss. Either you get drawn into them or you don’t. This movie, Sparks, is a bit different. It can certainly draw one in at the outset, but it comes up empty at the end with nothing but ideas rather than the results of those ideas. Fergus Campbell is a filmmaker to watch. Give Campbell some more cash and this movie could be remade into a cult classic. As it plays now, it’s essentially a bare bones piece of science fiction with Fisher doing top notch work, as usual. Fisher certainly has the range and depth to play this character, but the movie sells us short by not focusing entirely on her story. We didn’t need six other main characters to make it through a film that doesn’t even run 80-minutes.

Rating: 5.5/10

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