REVIEW: Spoonful of Sugar [2023]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 94 minutes
Release Date: March 3rd, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Shudder
Director(s): Mercedes Bryce Morgan
Writer(s): Leah Saint Marie

Most people are liars.

Despite being her second feature (I enjoyed Fixation out of TIFF last year a lot), Mercedes Bryce Morgan’s Spoonful of Sugar has reached the public first. It’s a doozy of a film—not because of any graphic nature or its subject matter, but because there’s so much going on that it becomes almost impossible to latch onto anyone or anything on-screen.

Leah Saint Marie’s script is touching on the relationship between sex and violence. The hallucinogenic properties of LSD in an emotionally disturbed person. The suburban underbelly of dark secrets behind white picket fences. And the lengths a mother will go to prove her love to her child. Lengths that include the complete destruction of her own body and soul.

With that laundry list of themes comes a disjointed compilation of viewpoints too. Three-quarters of the film is from Millicent’s (Morgan Saylor) perspective, the newly hired babysitter of a desperate family at wit’s end when it comes to their mute, violent, allergic-to-the-world son Johnny (Danilo Crovetti).

The other quarter focusing on the boy’s mother Rebecca (Kat Foster), a self-help author with understandable rage issues stemming from the unreliable men in her life: Johnny and husband Jacob (Myko Olivier). The latter two ultimately become objects in these women’s psycho-sexual games. He who needs nurturing and he who needs stimulating. Lines blur, boundaries are crossed, and the mirroring between desire and necessity confuse all involved with the help of Millicent’s psychedelic prescription.

There are definitely some intriguing moments (Millicent’s psychiatrist, as played by Keith Powell, inexplicably losing his finger during a session showing how much of what we see is filtered through her perpetual state of intoxication) and worthwhile commentary about double-standards and how abused people abuse others, but so much of it arrives as shock value without depth.

We move from one scene to the next with little to no context until an exposition dump of Millicent’s baggage provides easy answers and a last-second (but hardly surprising) reveal where it concerns Johnny and his parents supplies a hamfisted “twist” that only undercuts things further. It’s all style above substance with the pairing of melodramatic impulses and Saylor’s eccentric performance bringing to mind Lucky McKee’s May. I wanted it all to fit together, but it sadly never does.