Sugar Rot had its Quebec premiere on Aug 1 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Sugar Rot is billed as a feminist, punk rock, body horror film. It does involve the horrific transformation of a body, that of the protagonist fittingly named Candy (Chloe Macleod). One location in the film presents a few punk rock bands performing. And the John Waters-esque story world produced by director Becca Kozak is obsessed with female body standards and the normalization of the exploitation of women’s bodies. So, check, check, and check on the billing. At face value, at least.

There is a cruel contradiction at the sugary core of Sugar Rot. As Candy’s body becomes candy (literally), every character wants to use her body for their pleasure. This is a fine premise for a horror film that has something feminist on its mind. At the same time, there is no counterpoint to this exploitation. The characters are cruel to Candy, and Candy is cruel right back. And Candy is as enamored by the concept of consumption for one’s own pleasure as everyone else. Not to mention that the satirical story world here is happy to objectify Candy and critique her body before the ice-cream-ification begins. Whatever political ends the film intends to serve are likely compromised by its nihilism (it certainly isn’t going to convert the unconvinced when it comes to a woman’s right to choose, however funny its broad take on traditional Christian values is).

Sugar Rot gets by on its excessive, candy-colored grotesquerie. But frankly, much of its goopy makeup and fake phalluses look closer to silly than shocking. It didn’t compel me; given it is the film’s main offering, that poses a problem. I struggled to buy in.

Bad taste should be celebrated. It is the yin to pretentious yang; the necessary rejection of the “sweetness and light” elitism that historically has shut people out of the culture industries. Bad taste even for its own sake should be at the very least tolerated (I’m a fan of it, personally). Sugar Rot tries to both have its cake of bad taste for bad taste’s sake and use its seedy textual elements toward some political ends. It is hard for these both to square within the same text. Candy is continually violated—by strangers, by people close to her, by the repressive State. The film is brutal to Candy, and it never really justifies that brutality beyond the rather baseline satire introduced by the premise.

I, like many, have complex feelings about the rape-revenge genre. In that case, though, there is at least a revenge. However simplistic that eye-for-an-eye understanding of humanity may be, it at least functions as an outlet, a cathartic response to systematized oppression. I don’t see the catharsis in Sugar Rot. Some disliked last year’s The Substance because they felt that the script was cruel to its protagonist, that it was playing into the very hateful practices of misogyny that it claimed to be satirizing. I loved The Substance, and I don’t understand how those critics could not see the amount of empathy and compassion afforded to Elisabeth Sparkle.

People who love Sugar Rot may be able to convince me there is compassion here, or that at the very least that the punk rock nihilism is necessary to reach some cathartic end. (But also, how nihilist is punk, really?) Regardless, I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the film’s whimper of a final scene is anything resembling catharsis, let alone shock or in-your-face punk.

Final note: If you are not a fan of mouth sounds (truly the worst sounds humans produce), this may not be the film for you. The foley work is astonishingly gross.

Sugar Rot: C-

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)