Fantasia 2025: Sugar Rot - Punk and Provocative

The best and worst thing about Sugar Rot is how punk rock it feels. If we are to be reductive for a bit, punk rock eschews technical expectations in place of energy and relentless shock value. Sugar Rot is certainly a stilted film, feeling rather rough around the edges – especially in terms of performances. However, this is all part of the energetic amateurishness: a film quite uninterested in technical or conventional expectations. This wants to be affronting and audacious, and though it's easy to critique a lot of it in typical ways, these aspects are part of how it positions itself – very effectively – as an outsider work.

This is an exploitation film through and through, arguably with elements of the rape revenge film (or certainly in a, perhaps deconstructive, conversation with that genre). In an exaggerated, candy-coloured world, a girl called Candy (who works in an ice cream parlour) finds herself turning into some kind of literal candy following a sexual assault. It's a longform metaphor for the objectification of women, the commodification and the idea of consumption. It deals with all of this, and more, in spikey fashion. This can be incredibly off-putting and is certainly audacious. You could read very well thought out rejections of its content (and nod along) and read very well thought out defences of its content (and nod along). It is playing with fire and doing so interestingly. One could argue that it's just scattershot or not quite coherent but, more validly, it is provocative and wide reaching. It is good that a film about how women, specifically, end up consumed and dominated due to cultural systems and expectations doesn't cohere to clean expectations and isn't easily consumed.

Though, this may come a the cost of deeper resonance. It is an interesting film worthy of conversation but this more comes from charged imagery and the shocking content than from any richer material. A film of abrasive gestures more than a film of ideas. But this is by design, a middle-finger of a movie that really cleverly straddles the line between sheer entertainment and absolute offensiveness. It is incredibly shocking when it needs to be, soberingly so, but then can swing back to being riotously fun. Importantly, it eschews conventional ideas of catharsis, not bending back to an expected narrative structure and always being a touch more affronting. The film fits nicely into conversation with John Waters and Troma – and even has an overt reference to Herschell Gordon Lewis. This is extreme, transgressive cinema by design but is taking it on through a specific lens that differentiates it in a rewarding way.

It is routinely a film of contradictions: even when it's brutally realistic it includes the absurd and the ridiculous. A challenging watch, certainly, that earns its ability to shock and cause discomfort. Not all of it works but at every point it is compelling and fascinating. Sugar Rot is a lot of swings in every direction, supported by some really interesting looking gore effects that cement its central juxtaposition. What if The Fly (1986) but candy is a beguiling premise, and makes for really unique imagery that is both alluring and grotesque. This is the strength, the rot in the sugar. All that is tantalising is also disgusting, a codification of the struggles and contradictions – and of the rotten core of polite society. On a visual level, it works so well, and while the full filmic articulation of this has shoddy and arguably contradictory elements, it's hard to not just celebrate this on its own terms.