SXSW ’26: “Seekers of Infinite Love” is a Winding Road
It’s not going out on a limb to say that things in the world feel pretty precarious right now. In times like these, people look for any source of hope they can find to keep them going. It’s no surprise then, that cults and gregarious leaders with false promises appear to fill this void. In Victoria Strouse’s SXSW-premiering film, Seekers of Infinite Love, one such cult has gotten its hands on one of the Bachman siblings. It’s up to the rest of the family to help her see that this group doesn’t have the answers it claims it does.
Scarlett (Justine Lupe) has always been the most free-spirited of the Bachman siblings. Filling out the rest of the foursome are two brothers, one a lawyer (John Reynolds) and the other an artist (Griffin Gluck) who spends more time gambling than drawing, and Kayla (Hannah Einbinder), an anxious writer. The lawyer has gathered his two siblings in his office to talk about Scarlett and the cult she’s joined. The siblings, along with an expert in cult extraction (Justin Theroux), set off on a journey to bring their sister home.
Credit: Tim Suhrstedt
Seekers of Infinite Love presents a compelling premise. In her Q&A, Strouse mentioned that she’s always been interested in the sibling relationship because it’s the only one you can’t legally end. “You can divorce a partner, disown a child, and emancipate a parent, but you can’t legally separate yourself from a sibling. I’ve checked,” cracked Strouse after the film. The glue of Seekers of Infinite Love is the sense of duty between the siblings, even when they don’t get along. As Kayla says in the film, “If we weren’t related, I wouldn’t even be friends with him.” That sort of obligation is put on display here, but it’s not examined to the fullest. The dynamic of siblings is a strange mix of friendship, but family also and sometimes rival. It’s messy, and while Seekers of Infinite Love certainly has its messy moments, we don’t get a true sense of these characters on their own, outside of this family dynamic.
Since this is a roadtrip movie, the Bachman siblings make quite a few stops along the route. There’s a nice introduction of a time constraint on this journey that’s best left for the film to reveal. A few of these deviations from the planned destination are more fun than others — some feel more like when your parents dragged you to a dull historic site. Others, like an absurdist kidnapping, allow Seekers of Infinite Love to let loose into something really fun. This is a dark comedy of siblings who are trying to do the right thing, but who also aren’t meant for these emotionally heavy conversations. Seekers of Infinite Love has amassed a smart collection of comedians who are unafraid to push the scene to the extreme. When they’re unleashed, the film soars, but it’s often bogged down by one too many stops along the way.
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