Sugar Rot (2025)
Directed & Written by Becca Kozak
Starring Chloë MacLeod, Drew Forster, Michela Ross, & Charles Lysne.

Horror

★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
SLIGHT SPOILERS.

Fantasia 2025’s most in-your-face film is by far Becca Kozak’s Sugar Rot, a dark neon nightmare that follows Candy (Chloë MacLeod; also in Foreigner at Fantasia this year), an ice cream shop employee who gets raped by an ice cream delivery man and becomes host to a mutant fetus. Poor Candy starts dissolving into puddles of ice cream as time wears on. It’s the way her body’s treated as a means to an end that drives her over the edge. And if she’s not careful, she’ll be consumed to death.
Sugar Rot is a feminist, Marxist exploration of women’s bodies that sees Candy’s body go from her own property to a commodity and vessel for patriarchal desires. Kozak confronts the commodification and consumption of women and their bodies through Candy’s grotesque bodily journey that lies somewhere between vomit inducing and finger licking good.
Even before Candy’s body literally begins to melt into ice cream and bits of candy, she has to deal with misogynists at the ice cream shop objectifying it. Then there’s the assault. Rape is the height of capitalism’s social effect on women: men see women’s bodies as objects to own, to do with as they please. Later, when Candy’s body starts to melt and others around her begin to find her irresistibly delicious, her body becomes something for men, and even certain women, to consume. Kozak emphasises the various aspects of control men exert over pregnant women through the doctor who obsesses over manipulating women’s bodies. The creepy doc tells Candy: “I want to make you into my new doll.” His office advertises the Mommy Makeover to moms post-birth like advertising any other commodity; the post-birth woman’s body, for plastic surgeons, is something to capitalise on, which suggests there’s something innately ugly about women’s bodies after creating life. It’s part of the patriarchal cycle: man wants woman to have kids, man hates woman’s body after she has kids, man wants woman to get surgery to ‘repair’ her body back to pre-pregnancy shape. No matter where Candy turns, someone, usually a man, is trying to use or consume her body for their purposes. Her own boyfriend can’t help but bite pieces out of her; it takes eating pussy to a whole new level.

One of the greatest, most punk rock aspects of Sugar Rot is Kozak’s rejection of motherhood; her film doesn’t seem to be saying you’re fucked in the head if you want to be a mom, it seems to rightly and strongly believe that you’re fucked in the head if you think pushing women into motherhood is good for women, or the children being forced upon them. Candy would rather die than become a mother. When she’s asked if she’s trying to kill the baby in her belly, she replies: “I‘m trying to kill myself.” An iconic line comes after Candy says she’s transforming into something and a friend asks if she feels herself becoming a mother but she says “a monster.” Just the effects of the mutant child inside Candy cast motherhood as something awful and monstrous. The thing growing inside her is a genuine parasite that’s reducing her to nothing, a heightened genre nightmare of the real-life process of a baby feeding off its mother. There’s no upside to motherhood in Sugar Rot, and it’s made all the worse since Candy’s impregnated through a vicious act of male violence. Candy’s autonomy is destroyed by both her rapist and the mutant child, as her pregnant and candified corpse ultimately becomes nothing but a vessel for the sick desires of men.
Sugar Rot is a gross, creamy warning about how much, and how easily, society consumes women and their bodies; it happens every day, it’s happening right now as I type and you read these words. While the film is Canadian, its significance stretches across North America in a world post-Roe v. Wade overturning. Often we Canadians love to think we’re so different from America, yet we have our own would-be dictators here trying to roll back rights. In one scene, a woman tells Barbie: “You must be infected with feminism.” Some women carry water for the patriarchy, just like the many (white) women who vote for people like Trump, or up here in Canada, someone like Pierre Poilievre. Sugar Rot focuses not only on the horrors of men, it digs into the horrors of capitalism, too, and even a bit into religion at times. Kozak leaves no stone unturned, nor does she look away from any of the nasty shit she finds under them. Her film is fearlessly feminist, proudly hideous, and unpretentiously Marxist. Lesley Gore can keep her “Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows”—I’ll take Sugar Rot‘s gore, lollipops, and pussy any day of the week.