Obscured PicturesScience fiction has always been a flexible genre, one that covers a huge range of stories, from pulp adventures to space operas to time-travel rom-coms. It’s a constantly evolving, amorphous genre that can demand the highest of budgets to bring to life its far-off worlds. Or it can be the perfect backdrop for a low-budget, lo-fi character drama.At this year’s SXSW Film & TV Festival, the latter ended up dominating the space, with sci-fi becoming the backdrop to intimate human drama — with varying degrees of success. Is it an indicator of a growing trend in sci-fi filmmaking? Or just a coincidence that several filmmakers used time travel or digital consciousness transference to tell character-driven stories? Perhaps it’s both. But here’s a snapshot of some of the best and worst sci-fi films to use the genre as a prop for their character dramas.AnimaSydney Chandler continues to excel at an inhuman stoicism in Anima. | Obscured PicturesThere’s a weightless feeling to Anima, the sci-fi drama from director Brian Tetsuro Ivie set in a retro-futuristic future where technologies have advanced so much that pets can live forever or a person’s consciousness can be uploaded to a cloud after their physical body perishes. Perhaps it’s the stoic nature of protagonist Beck (Alien: Earth’s Sydney Chandler), an antisocial engineer who accepts a job as a handler for Paul (Shogun’s Takehiro Hira), a lonely Japanese businessman preparing to upload his consciousness before a terminal illness runs its course. Or perhaps it’s the film’s rather lifeless appreciation of life, as Beck and Paul embark on a curious cross-country farewell tour. Or perhaps it’s just the fact that the very nature of Anima’s futuristic triumph over mortality — with its immortal pets and digitally immortal people — makes its life-affirming story feel mostly mundane.With its Japanese environs (though the movie is vague on its setting, occasionally stopping by various U.S. motels) and fixation on the connective power of music, Anima feels at least partly inspired by the works of Haruki Murakami, but its approximation of the 1Q84 author’s ambiguous surrealism mostly falls flat. As Paul drags Beck to the people in his life he’s scorned or left behind, Ivie sprinkles in random absurd imagery and futuristic flair, but Anima is a frustratingly generic road-trip movie. You don’t get much of a sense of its world, or of Paul’s regrets, apart from what he literally articulates to Beck. It’s an aimless sci-fi drama whose stakes are as thinly sketched out as its characters.Anima premiered March 12 at SXSW. It does not yet have a distributor or general release date.The SaviorsAdam Scott and Danielle Deadwyler are both wasted in The Saviors. | Courtesy of SXSWThe Saviors may have been the most disappointing waste of the time and talent it had at its disposal that I saw at SXSW. Starring Adam Scott and Danielle Deadwyler as a suburban couple on the verge of divorce, The Saviors is a sci-fi mystery masquerading as a paranoid psychological thriller. Which would be fine if the paranoid psychological thriller half wasn’t steeped in antiquated Middle Eastern stereotypes and half-baked political commentary.Kevin Hamedani directed The Saviors, which follows Scott and Deadwyler’s Sean and Kim Harrison, who live in a quiet suburban neighborhood that is suddenly shaken up when Sean and Kim’s Airbnb guests arrive. Their guests are Amir and Jahan Razi (Theo Rossi and Nazanin Boniadi), a Middle Eastern brother and his deaf sister who seem perfectly lovely… but whose odd behavior starts to raise Sean and Kim’s suspicions: They are skittish, they always seem to be watching others, and worst of all, they’re hiding strange machinery that looks like it has the makings of a bomb. With the president scheduled to visit their town, Sean and Kim begin to worry that they’re at the center of a giant conspiracy — a suspicion that is truer than they could have expected.The Saviors frustratingly holds its sci-fi cards close to its chest, occasionally doling out hints like a flash of green light that appears from the guesthouse Amir and Jahan are staying in, or surreal apocalyptic dreams that plague Sean. But mostly it prefers to play out the paranoid fantasies of Sean and Kim, who believe they’re harboring terrorists. It’s a disappointingly backward and staid approach to a story that begins with such promise, only to — ahem — blow it all up too late.The Saviors premiered March 13 at SXSW. It does not yet have a distributor or general release date.SparksThe quirky ensemble of Sparks is where the movie shines. | Obscured PicturesCleo (Elsie Fisher) has just moved to the small town of Sparks, Nebraska, but she knows immediately that she wants out as soon as possible. When a cigarette vending machine unexpectedly dispenses a book on French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, Cleo becomes an avid cinephile. And by the time she meets the Crop, a group of drifter teens who spend their time visiting the nearby reservoir that they believe has the power to transport them through time, she has decided that she wants to travel back to 1960s Paris to become an actress. Crop leader Antoine (Charlie B. Foster) instantly falls for Cleo and pushes the group to try to help her achieve her dream. But when Cleo disappears on her own in the reservoir, the Crop is left at a loss of what to do — until she returns and upends their whole idea of how the world works.Sparks is easily the best of this batch of lo-fi sci-fi movies. A charming and whimsical queer coming-of-age movie, Sparks is steeped in a dreaminess that feels fitting for its cast of daydreamers. The ensemble — which includes newcomers and up-and-comers Denny McAuliffe, Madison Hu, Simon Downes Toney, Thomas Deen Baker, and Julia D’Angelo — form the raw, jagged heart of the film, written and directed by Fergus Campbell. The teens fall in and out of love, host eccentric barbecues that verge on the surreal, participate in dance-offs with queer cowboys, and speak in a monotone, Wes Andersonian affect that masks their roiling emotions under the surface. It’s the kind of indie sci-fi story that this lo-fi approach is made for, and it’s destined to be a hidden gem discovered by budding cinephiles.Sparks premiered March 12 at SXSW. It does not yet have a distributor or general release date.