Kevin Hamedani’s paranoid comedy-thriller The Saviors feels beamed in from another era. Post-9/11, to be specific, when most white Americans thought any brown person with even the slightest religious indicator was a potential terrorist. Of course, America today is no more welcoming to immigrants than it was, say, twenty years ago, but the bleak punchline of this tepid, seriocomic film is philosophically naive.
It certainly doesn’t help that Hamedani crams his ideas into the film’s dying seconds. Narratively, The Saviors telegraphs its inevitable direction from so far away that it makes much of its ninety minutes quite tedious, and by the time it reveals its “twist,” nothing feels all that dramatic. It is neither biting enough as a social satire nor tense enough to stand as a legitimate political thriller. Adam Scott and Danielle Deadwyler do what they can to make Hamedani’s script zip along, and it is not without pleasure, but the ultimate goal of its critique falls woefully flat.
The Saviors’ Approach Is Too Diffuse To Have Much Impact
Scott and Deadwyler play Sean and Kim Harrison, a couple on the brink of a divorce with a house that needs serious repairs before it can be sold. Sean wants to keep trying to make it work in couple’s therapy; Kim doesn’t think there’s anything left to salvage. But it’s clear they still have a lot of sexual and romantic tension lingering in the air, and though they sleep in separate bedrooms (she upstairs, he in the basement), the threat of a reunion seems promising.
In order to solve multiple problems at once, they rent out their guest house to make money to pay for the water damage, thus allowing them to sell and move on with their respective lives. Their tenants: Amir and Jahan (Theo Rossi and Nazanin Boniadi, respectively), a brother and sister from Seattle. Hamedani works hard to sell the idea that these are awkward and suspicious people, but in the film’s slow-moving first act, it’s never all that convincing. Jahan sometimes intensely stares for long periods of time, but otherwise, they just seem kind of normal. That would be okay if the takeaway was supposed to be that Sean is a moderately racist paranoiac, but it’s fairly clear we’re supposed to agree with his notions.
Sean is unemployed, depressed, and smoking a lot of weed these days, so his speculations take off without much control. He is partly influenced by his conservative family: His sister, Cleo (Kate Berlant), jokingly refers to the Muslim guests as a “sleeper cell,” and his racist parents (Colleen Camp and Ron Perlman) are fans of an outwardly neo-Nazi publication which spouts the erroneous claim that Arabs are fond of stealing white people’s identities. But he is also influenced by news reports which warn about “extremist” liberal groups that are preparing to protest the arrival of a controversial President, and soon wonders if his guests are planning to bomb the President’s appearance.
That President is never named, but Hamedani means Trump. There is mention of an egregious number of signed executive orders that target immigration, US-orchestrated bombings in the Middle East, and a previous failed assassination attempt. It’s hard to come away with any other conclusion. It’s never fully clear what kind of politics Sean himself holds, except that he is clearly left of the rest of his family, and his marriage to a Black woman is meant to suggest he is at least nominally liberal.
All that flies out the window so fast it’ll make your head spin. Obviously, Hamedani means to make a meal about how quick we are to suspect our neighbors when the world starts to fall apart – “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds,” so the saying goes – but it’s hard to understand the degree of Sean’s distrust at such a quick speed. Juicier (and much funnier, too) is that Sean and Kim’s rekindling comes as the result of a shared paranoia, and one wishes a bigger meal was made out of their seemingly erotic turn-on from spying.
To be fair, Amir and Jahan do eventually start to act legitimately suspicious. Amir claims to be an architect, here to start his own firm, and says Jahan is a physicist on sabbatical, but it’s clear there are a lot of lies and half-truths in these and other stories. Things start to get really strange when Amir doesn’t appear to know what a cricket is, and Sean spots a box of odd-looking computer parts in their bedroom.
As Sean and Kim continue to investigate their neighbors, it seems like Amir and Jahan start investigating them in return. But The Saviors is not a simple tit-for-tat battle; it is also an uncomfortable mix of Hitchcockian thriller and sketch comedy. Kate Berlant’s lover, Jimmy Clemente (Greg Kinnear), is a buffoonish private investigator with a bad wig and 1970s-style (purple-tinted aviators that are completely out of place, for example), and in between tense stakeouts and anxious conversations, Hamedani forces in one-liners and kooky jokes.
There are moments where The Saviors is a decently fun time, but it doesn’t lean hard enough in any one direction. The film might’ve been better suited to jumping between perspectives, trying to build its mystery in the vein of Rear Window, or settling into its cynically comic inclinations. But it doesn’t do any of these things all that effectively, and no amount of Berlant’s clowning or Scott’s charm can save Hamedani’s film from its own portentous fate.
The Saviors screened at the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival.
- Release Date
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March 13, 2026
- Director
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Kevin Hamedani
- Writers
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Travis Betz, Kevin Hamedani
- Producers
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Adam Scott, Bradley Gallo, Matt Smith, Nicholas Weinstock, Naomi Scott, Michael Helfant, Dan Gedman
Cast
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Danielle Deadwyler
Kimberley Harrison
