The Director of Adam Scott's Film The Saviors Talks Sc-Fi Influences
· BCPosted in: Movies | Tagged: adam scott, Kevin Hamedani, the saviors
The Director of Adam Scott's Film The Saviors Talks Sc-Fi Influences
The director of the dark comedy thriller The Saviors discusses the film's influences, including The X-Files and Steven Spielberg.
Published Sat, 21 Mar 2026 10:17:06 -0500
by Aedan Juvet
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Article Summary
- The Saviors blends dark comedy, thriller, and sci-fi with a story of suburban paranoia and mysterious tenants.
- Director Kevin Hamedani cites The X-Files, The Twilight Zone, and Steven Spielberg as key influences.
- The film builds suspense through gradual reveals, inviting viewers into a world of suspicion and genre twists.
- The Saviors has divided critics at SXSW, sparking conversation for its bold mix of satire and mystery elements.
Kevin Hamedani's new dark comedy The Saviors starts out as a domestic stress story, then steadily dips into something a little stranger (and quirkier) with a multi-genre twist. In the film, Adam Scott and Danielle Deadwyler play Sean and Kim Harrison, a suburban couple at the core of the story whose marriage is fraying while they try to keep up with the mortgage. To make the numbers work, they rent out a guest house or garage unit, and the new tenants arrive late at night with a trunk and a schedule that feels intentionally hard to decipher.
From there, the movie leans into a slow drip of suspicious details, and what begins as anxious curiosity becomes a paranoid narrative, with the couple's fear shaping the way they interpret everything their tenants do. And that layer of paranoia is also where the film's genre ambitions come into focus.
The Saviors Filmmaker on X-Files and Steven Spielberg
Hamedani has now specifically talked about pulling from big sci-fi and mystery touchstones, explaining to Screen Rant, "I am a huge Twilight Zone fan. That's stuff deep in my brain. I'm also a big X-Files fan and a Spielberg fan. So that sort of what's in the box, the magical box question is something I always try to infuse in a good story. And it just seemed to fit in this theme that we were trying to play by having a big mystery feed the audience down this road of paranoia in a darkly comedic way."
The ensemble of The Saviors is fairly seasoned, with Scott and Deadwyler joined by Theo Rossi and Nazanin Boniadi as the tenants, plus Kate Berlant, Ron Perlman, Colleen Camp, Greg Kinnear, and Daveed Diggs in supporting roles. So far, the SXSW response has been split. Rotten Tomatoes is currently showing five critic reviews, with three negative and two positive, and there is still no audience score posted yet. Some writers have framed the film as a sharp, timely provocation, while others feel the satire starts to loop and loses its punch. Either way, it is clearly landing as the kind of genre swing that invites disagreement rather than consensus.
But at the very least, with the film's influence set and its experienced cast, it has the ingredients for a strong genre conversation once it expands beyond the festival bubble.
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