Fantasia 2025: Sugar Rot Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

Genre cinema historically welcomes experimentation and a subversive approach to familiar genre codes. In Sugar Rot, writer-director Becca Kozak twists the status quo of femininity and gender tropes. Here, she tells the story of Candy (Macleod), a clerk in an ice cream shop. After a brutal sexual assault, she gets contaminated with an odd, sweet substance that she discharges. Suddenly, everyone around her is obsessed with her sweetness and irresistible flavor.

Kozak approaches the hardships in overcoming the trauma in the moments post-assault. In this sense, the director encapsulates an undesired pregnancy in the codes of a growing monster within Candy. This particular element merges with an aesthetic akin to that of body horror. The director discusses the bodily changes caused by the unwanted pregnancy of her lead character through shifts in her weight, size, and clothing. Kozak utilizes the pregnancy and the resulting body changes to argue for abortion, especially the lack of reproductive rights defended by religious motives, such as pro-life doctors against the procedure. Accordingly, the film disputes the anti-abortion arguments from conservatives, especially the moral hypocrisy of those against the procedure, but engage in cheating, multiple sexual partners, among other practices.

Furthermore, Kozak’s feature challenges gender and societal conventions through the subversiveness and the punkness of its approach and lead. Candy is a free woman who enjoys attending punk concerts and wishes to receive the night spot at the strip club where she also works. However, her club manager justifies her exclusion through society’s beauty pattern, primarily because he wants her to get a breast augmentation. Therefore, Kozak constantly introduces elements that contribute to her central thesis: the lack of freedom for women. To advance her argument, the film adds segments with individuals who morally clash with the lead, such as her mother, who is not the ideal stereotype of a maternal figure. Candy is faced with those who oppose her ideas and ideals, continuously attacking her based on her beliefs.

A film has a lot to say, Sugar Rot is a feminist scream about sexual assault, reproductive rights, and freedom, crucial themes still relevant to today’s times. However, the film is one that often repeats itself over the course of its 80-minute runtime. Embracing sex-exploitation tropes and expands on the level of violence and abuse inflicted towards her lead, Kozak uses a simple and common mundane catchphrase, ‘You’re so sweet, darling, ‘ and expands it to genre codes. Yet, it also tires itself through its welcomed aggression and subversiveness. It is a textually and visually combative film that questions everything in society. Nevertheless, it feels flat and redundant when it develops its central idea and circles towards its conclusion, which finalizes this subversive piece of filmmaking.

Ultimately, Becca Kozak’s Sugar Rot is a subversive and punk effort that engages with the sex-exploitation sub-genre to flex the director’s ideas upon gender conventions, and the dangerous state of attacks upon female freedoms and reproductive rights. Besides the visual boldness, the film falls into a redundancy that diminishes the important issues it aims to discuss.

still courtesy of Sugar Rot Productions

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Pedro Lima

Brazilian film writer. He is also a producer and executive producer for Zariah Filmes. Member of the International Film Society Critics Association (IFSCA), International Documentary Association (IDA), and Gotham and Media Film Institute.