If someone tells you there’s a film about two burnouts hired to take a kid to rehab, you might expect a feel-good story where life lessons are learned, and everything is solved with a hug.
The Shitheads is definitely not that movie. Instead, writer/director Macon Blair said, “It’s a propulsive, berserk buddy comedy,” heavily influenced by both Midnight Run and The Last Detail. In it, broke no-hopers Mark (Dave Franco, Together) and Davis (O’Shea Jackson Jr., Ingrid Goes West) are hired by a firm that specializes in transporting people to rehab. Unfortunately, their first passenger is Sheridan (Mason Thames, The Black Phone), a rich kid influencer with the morals of a polecat and zero conscience.
After debuting at Sundance, the film was acquired last month by Independent Film Company for a summer theatrical release. But first, Austin-based Blair gets to bring The Shitheads home for its Texas premiere at this week’s South by Southwest. Having first established a career as a writer and actor, he turned to directing with his tender 2017 drama, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, but followed that up with a raucous, vomitous reboot of The Toxic Avenger. On the surface, The Shitheads has more of his first film’s character study, but Blair still delivers his own brand of gross-out comedy and carnage. Like the meme goes, it’s one for the “Ha, ha, yes!” sickos.
“That’s my whole thing,” he laughed. “What I got excited about early on was the idea that it could be, on one hand, this very broad, slapstick-y kind of comedy, and then it would have something that was very nasty and dark going on concurrently, and it would periodically jump between those two lanes.”
The original idea for the film came from producer Alex Orr, who Blair first worked with while playing the lead in Jeremy Saulnier’s breakout bleak drama, Blue Ruin. Blair recalled, “He knew some guys who worked at a service like this. Now, to be clear, there are very organized, trained, reputable services that do this kind of job but the guys that Alex knew were not that. They were untrained and unsupervised, and this seems like a precarious position, so we thought that would be a funny premise for a road-trip-type comedy.”
Under the bruises, blood, and projectile diarrhea, there’s a political subtext to The Shitheads. As Davis points out, the only difference between Sheridan and Mark is that Sheridan has money, and that money has become a shield against any kind of accountability or responsibility. Indeed, he positively flaunts his immunity, having become a social media celebrity for his bad-boy antics. That idea of infamy just becoming fame was a theme when Blair and Orr first discussed the story back in 2013, but the nature of Sheridan’s celebrity status changed in the intervening years. In earlier drafts, Blair said, “it was a little bit more like TMZ. It was him in court and him acting badly in public. It wasn’t him posting to his own followers. That was something just to make it a little more realistic about how people would interact these days.”
But while the nature of Sheridan’s fame may have shifted from Nielsen numbers to follower counts, for Blair the underlying story remains the same. “People who have extraordinary amounts of wealth and resources, either in their family or themselves, can buy themselves out of trouble. That’s evergreen.” If anything, with the seemingly endless torrent of revelations from the Epstein files, The Shitheads has only grown more relevant, “and I don’t love that,” said Blair. “I wish that it was a little more far-fetched.”
The Shitheads
Festival Favorite, Texas Premiere
Sunday 15, 6:15pm, Zach Theater
Wednesday 18, 9:30pm, State Theatre
This article appears in SXSW 2026 Festival Guide.