Meet Millicent. She’s a twenty-one year old student working on a thesis about children with severe allergies, which means that a prospective babysitting job could double up as useful research. This is because the child needing a sitter, Johnny (Danilo Crovetti) has a seemingly endless list of issues: he has the mother lode of severe allergies, a strict regime, a raft of medications and he’s non verbal, too. But Millicent (Morgan Saylor) really wants the job, and manages to talk her way past his hawkishly-concerned mother Rebecca (Kat Foster), who has a tough schedule of her own and really needs the help. Rebecca’s a self-help author of the ‘sexual awakening’ variety, you know the type: game face, high heels, famine-thin authority. Besides, Millicent quickly forms a rapport with Johnny, so this is enough to get her in. Her relationship with the household thus begins.
Here’s a nicely twisted, twisting tale about families, motherhood, sexuality and identity. Nothing here is exactly as it seems, but even if it were, there’d be more than enough fascinated consternation to go around. Millicent’s enthralled, appalled reaction to Johnny’s father Jacob (Myko Olivier) walking around with his shirt off sounds one early alarm; this family evidently has a lot going on, with husband and wife playing a game of queasy, thwarted encounters against protestations of duty (motherhood and sex are not compatible here, at least in the ways mother Rebecca wants). The presence of a new, naïve girl catches Jacob’s eye, too; there’s a sense that any man readily walking around half-naked when he could be seen by the hired help knows exactly what he’s doing.
But what quickly becomes apparent is that Millicent has her own problems. When she’s with Johnny, she comes across as a playmate, not a sitter. They each seem mutually at some stage of arrested development, but nonetheless, the ways that they bond feel authentically sweet, with some good outcomes along the way for this troubled, isolated little boy. This is a horror, though: it’s not here to resolve all of these issues and make no mistake, everyone has issues here, not just the key players. Millicent has a kind of morbid fascination with family life, but her perspective is that of an outsider, as she has had an abnormal experience of family during her own life to date. She sees the family unit as something to break into, then to do better than everyone else.
Her take on this is dispassionate at first, but she becomes increasingly inveigled into Johnny’s family, something facilitated in all the weirdest ways by her medicinal doses of LSD, part of a treatment for anxiety and depression. Along the way, sexuality looms over her, unwanted but wanted, and Millicent seems in many ways like a new version of May. There are the same abortive efforts to understand the opposite sex, the same unseemly behaviour, the errors, the kooky but failed attempts to grasp a normal life. There’s maybe a little Lola Stone, too. The unpalatable message here is that these troubled girls don’t have a grounding in values and morals, so how can they truly have what they want? Spoonful of Sugar is as sad as it’s sickly and disturbing. That goes for Rebecca, too: via her, motherhood gets a solid drubbing, standing as a list of unpleasant obligations which come between Rebecca and everything she wants. If there’s any hopeful message here, it’s – get thee to a nunnery. That would be easier for every woman concerned in this narrative.
That’s a tale as old as time, of course, or at least as old as nunneries. But Spoonful of Sugar feels very modern, and not just through its slick, appealing aesthetic style (Shudder Originals usually look the part). The career woman and all her attendant guilt, the experimental treatments for anxiety, roles within modern academia, up-to-date, if flawed social care, and even the discourse on choking during sex, which is apparently very now: all of these things position the film on the outskirts of a recognisable world, our own. Things steadily ramp up, and Spoonful of Sugar is more than able to shock; it’s a film peppered with fetid rabbits, after all. That’s got to be some kind of sign.
Even if you may hazard a guess as to where it is all going (and hey, you may be wrong) this is a stylish nightmare with a surprising amount taking place, on and off screen, across a thankfully modest run time. Not everyone will like all of the elements used, but any film which can dig into the idea of ‘victim’ and have so much of interesting substance to say is just fine with me.
Spoonful of Sugar (2022) is available now on Shudder.