In Sender, writer-director Russell Goldman’s high-anxiety debut, the filmmaker expands on his 2022 short Return to Sender, in which Allison Tolman starred as a woman who receives packages she didn’t order. That may not sound like a premise that would result in a paranoid, darkly comedic thriller, much less a feature. But in extending his story from 18 minutes to just over 90, Goldman follows a maddening scenario involving an online retailer called Smirk, a fictionalized Amazon counterpart. More significantly, he captures the frenzied mindset of his protagonist, who grapples with staying sober and several other major life changes—all compounded by a layer of justifiable paranoia brought on by the endless packages. Goldman’s tweaky style and elusive scripting create a peculiar, out-of-whack presentation that destabilizes the viewer, firmly placing us in his main character’s perspective. However, by the end, the journey through this cine-manic headspace doesn’t add up to much, and the potential character study at the center feels somewhat lost in the mechanics of the conspiracy. 

Britt Lower (AppleTV’s Severance) stars as Julia, who has just lost her job and moved into a rental home to get her life on track. She is backed financially by her overbearing sister Tatiana (Anna Baryshnikov), who occasionally comes nosing around to verify that Julia doesn’t backslide. And she doesn’t. Julia attends regular Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, where she meets the steely Whitney (Rhea Seehorn), who isn’t interested in being her sponsor. But at home, Julia receives a Smirk package with her brand of lipstick. The problem? She didn’t order it. She calls customer service, and the representative doesn’t help much before telling her, “Be sure to stay alert and aware.” Wait, what? Sender is loaded with nagging, unplaceable details like this. They’re often amusing, intriguing, and exasperating in the same moment. But these pieces don’t complete a whole picture, at least not a narratively satisfying one. 

The Smirk packages, delivered by the outwardly helpful, nice-guy driver Charlie (David Dastmalchian), contain a random assortment of objects, from drum kits to protein powder. The squirrelly Julia, already coming apart at the seams from her recent drama, doesn’t know what to make of it. She’s convinced there’s some plot against her, perhaps by someone at Smirk. To what end, she doesn’t know. But Goldman gives us a glimpse of the long-term consequences of her ordeal in the prologue, which features Jamie Lee Curtis (also a producer) as Lisa, a woman in circumstances similar to Julia’s. Lisa’s response to receiving a box of soil with a broken shin pad (with “Can’t Can’t Can” scrawled on it) entails an attempt to suffocate herself with the bubble wrap, only to do far worse with a sharp edge of the shin pad. To show Lisa’s fate, Goldman’s imagery becomes twisted and surreal but also cryptic. 

Sender’s disorienting mood is matched by a skewed formal presentation. Cinematographer Gemma Doll-Grossman’s wide-angle lenses and arch angles might feel at home in a Ken Russell or Terry Gilliam feature such as The Devils (1971) or 12 Monkeys (1996). Julia’s half-remembered drinking binges, accented by blurry close-ups, suggest she may have slept with any number of coworkers. She can’t remember, and it embarrasses her. Her rental is dressed in simple if shabby décor, which gives way to Julia’s erratic collage-like overhaul. Melisa Myers’ stuffed production design makes the most of heightened colors and banal, cluttered rooms that lend a normality to the bizarre, ever more disturbing predicament. Nathan Ruyle’s erratic music delivers what must be described as a soundscape rather than a traditional score, with collusive sound effects and tones driving our certainty that Julia is onto something. Along with Marco Rosas’ discordant editing, Goldman’s technical approach effectively reflects Julia’s fragmented, sleep-deprived mind. But his work as a writer hasn’t done enough to justify this level of technique. 

After Julia makes a revelatory discovery that small cameras have been embedded in the products from those mysterious packages, the eventual explanation about what has been happening and why strains logic and underwhelms. It also raises even more unanswered questions. Although well-made and acted—Lower and Seehorn should be on track to movie stardom—Goldman’s script could have used another draft to better work through what unfolds. Sender doesn’t give us enough of its characters’ inner lives beyond the situation at hand, so Julia, Charlie, Tatiana, and Whitney feel like devices in a scenario rather than well-drawn human beings. Even so, Goldman fills his film with deeply broken people who try to gain control of their lives by controlling others, exposing and preying on their weaknesses. Despite the material’s potential resonance, Goldman’s style is overpowering. Still, his kernel of an idea and the way he explores it demonstrate his clear skill, and for much of Sender, its sheer oddball energy earns admiration.

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Eddie Huang has never felt lighter. Last month, after his debut novel, “Come Undone,” finally released, something shifted.

“I have a family. I feel healed,” he said over coffee and short ribs in Santa Monica hours ahead of a live talk with Ottessa Moshfegh, the bestselling, critically acclaimed author of Huang’s favorite book, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation.”

“People always write me off as a personality or a multi-hyphenate,” he said. “It’s a nice way of saying I’m not really good at anything. But I didn’t have any of that this time.” He leaned forward, serious. “I have to be honest. I do think the Knicks are a big, big part of it.”

His beloved Knicks winning the championship, he said, kept him from spiraling over the book. In person, Huang subdues his ironic braggadocio with polite eye contact and rolling belly laughs at his own jokes. For years, audiences have watched Huang resist whatever box you put him in. His particular brand of cultural fluency — a rapid-fire mix of food, fashion, basketball, politics and pop culture — is what made the “Gua Bao Bad Boy” impossible to categorize.

For most of his career, Huang has seemed constitutionally incapable of standing still. Chef. Memoirist. TV host. Filmmaker. Lawyer. Comic. Podcaster. His first book, “Fresh Off the Boat,” became the longest-running network sitcom centered on an Asian American family, even as Huang publicly distanced himself from the show. Since leaving post-fires L.A. for New York, he’s reopened Baohaus — returning to the kitchen that built his career. Waiting for him at home after the book tour is his wife, Natashia Perrotti, and their 2-year-old son.

Now there’s “Come Undone,” fiction that Huang called his most honest — and vulnerable — work to date.

“It’s sort of this next-gen auto fiction type thing that is creating its own rules,” Moshfegh said ahead of their Q-and-A. “It made me think about my own appreciation for the experience of male heterosexuality and how much it’s been commodified.”

The book follows Hubie, a globe-trotting food-show host drifting through Chateau Marmont, Madeo, Nobu and other “dirtbag L.A” (as Huang coins) spots. He meets Janine, his equal in appetite and id, sending him into a tailspin of yearning and loops of Sky Ferreira’s “Everything Is Embarrassing” on sadboi walks. The “two walking red flags” decide to try to make it work.

Huang called the novel an “autofictional riddle.” The puzzle isn’t especially difficult if you’ve followed his relationship with Perrotti, who co-hosts their podcast, “Canal Street Dreams.” Marrying a writer, she’s learned, often means finding out what he feels by reading it. “We’ll get into a fight,” she said, “and I’ll wake up to a Substack article about it.”

It’s also part of the private life she’s since conceded. “It’s annoying,” she added. “But now I can read it, and maybe understand him a little bit better. He’s trying to communicate through the writing, like sending somebody a song and saying, ‘I want you to listen to these lyrics.’”

The novel goes further, drawing from experiences the couple has never discussed publicly. In the novel, Hubie and Janine’s relationship pivots after an ectopic pregnancy ends in loss. Perrotti said the scene is fictionalized but mirrors a similar experience they had early in their own relationship.

“It brought us closer together,” she said. “It was the catalyst for us realizing we were serious.”

Before Huang could finish the book, the life he was writing about had to fall apart. “This book was very much about breaking up with your family to start your own,” he said. “There was a lot of anger in the book that had not been resolved.”

By the end of 2024, Huang had stopped speaking to his mother. The break followed what he described as a blowup at a Cheesecake Factory. It also unlocked the ending he’d been chasing.

Eddie Huang.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Looking back, Huang thinks the earlier versions failed because he was still arguing with her. He’s still trying, in some way, to communicate with her through his writing. “If there’s one person I wish would read the book,” he said, “it would be my mom.”

There were other chapters he had to close the book on, mainly Hollywood. His foray into fiction coincided with the writers’ strike, drying up all his income and future projects. That same year, he became a father. “I had to accept and realize that my value was not in making money,” he said. “Because for three years, I couldn’t.”

He recalled a particular low point researching life insurance policies. “I had to rebuild my whole self. Really love myself despite not being able to offer anybody anything.”

That new certainty didn’t make Huang any less willing to pick fights. Last year, as his documentary “Vice Is Broke” — an autopsy of the media company behind “Huang’s World” and its eventual bankruptcy — awaited release, Huang said distributor Mubi shelved the film after he boycotted the company over Sequoia Capital’s investment in an Israeli defense technology startup. (Mubi denied this and said it still planned to distribute the film.)

The ghost of Vice still lingers in today’s media ecosystem in what he called our “era of cartel journalism:” creators navigating a world of blurred incentives and corporate interests. He traced this instinct to challenge those systems back to Socrates’ “gadfly” — the person whose job was to annoy power. “As a writer, you should be challenging people,” he said. “If your memoir can be turned into a sitcom, it probably wasn’t challenging.”

Eddie Huang.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

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After the 2025 L.A. fires drove his new family back to New York, Huang went back to cooking. He worked pop-ups, reopened Baohaus and found himself alongside line cooks half his age. In March 2025, he rewrote the novel in five days. That same month “was the first month I didn’t overdraft my credit card,” he said, with the majority of his income today coming from the restaurant. It’s allowed him to make films, write books and walk away from deals he doesn’t believe in. “Being a chef is the anchor that allows me to maintain my artistic integrity.”

For years, comparisons to Anthony Bourdain followed Huang everywhere. The two eventually became friends.

“He was one of the few people who was as advertised,” Huang said. “Nicer and more generous in person. And wounded.”

Bourdain is the only real person who appears in “Come Undone” under his own name.

When Huang mentions him, he stops talking. He covers his face. Tears come.

“I don’t believe in God,” he said, “but I asked the universe why for many, many years.”

Bourdain’s suicide, he said, was one of the reasons he walked away from “Huang’s World” in 2018. At the time, few people understood why. “It was Tony. It was family. It was everything.”

Eddie Huang.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Now, looking back, Huang thinks he was writing “Come Undone” toward a different ending than the one he’d imagined.

“This book is a guy saying, ‘I don’t want to be like my biological father,’” he said. “And, in the most respectful, loving way, I don’t want to go out like Tony.”

He paused. “I needed to name the sadness in me. I needed to allow myself to be loved.”

Huang is already writing another memoir about getting back into the kitchen. Still, he said, these days, he’d rather write fiction.

Rudi, an L.A. native, is a freelance art and culture writer. She’s at work on her debut novel about a stuttering student journalist.