Spoonful of Sugar

One of Shudder's low-budget horror stories. It is a slow-burning film. It takes its time to develop the characters. It's not a horror-action movie.

At the forefront of the story is a young couple who's struggling to take care of their only young son who is severely autistic. Johnny (Danillo Crovetti) throws violent tantrums and is sometimes hard to contain. Dealing with Johnny's issues puts a great strain on the couple's relationship and they look numb on the outside as well as inside.

After losing the last nanny, they hire Millicent (Morgan Taylor) without doing a background check. Millicent is a cookie herself with a whole sort of psychological issues. She perfectly plays the role of someone who has been abused and has been in and out of foster homes throughout her life.

When Millicent meets Johnny, an immediate rapport is established between them. Millicent first time feels a sense of family, and, Johnny first time feels safe. Soon after, Millicent quits her prescription LSD drops for feeling much better and gets the bright idea of using her LSD drops on Johnny's foods and medicine. What could go wrong?

It is not an exciting movie but it is a good story, good direction, and good acting. The script is good. If you don't like slow-cooking stories, it might not be your cup of tea.

This is an interesting film with some great performances that ultimately doesn't quite work. It's as if there are a few too many ideas going on and something got left on the cutting room floor. It also doesn't help that characters aren't clearly drawn, should you be rooting for them or hating them ? The twist was a nice touch but in the end it doesn't save the film. Someone dropped the ball, either the writer, director or both, but the film doesn't quite gel into something I would watch again. For the performances though, the strangeness of it all and the fact that it uses a rare case of a male as an object of desire, makes this worth a one time watch.

This film is exhausting. The plot is scant at best. The idea, I think, might be interesting but the execution, writing, dialogue really don't help to understand it. I appreciate the idea I really do.

The end result though is a bunch of really disturbed characters and there's no one root for, not even the little kid. They're trying to make a disturbing horror film which it's not. It's not horror at all, maybe towards the end. But it's more just a muddled dream sequence/perverted LSD trip.

I couldn't summarize this move because by the end I didn't care what happened. There are some cool shots, cinematography, and some somewhat disturbing scenes. So maybe it's worth a watch for that. But besides that I just left feeling empty and sad. The end.

There's a definite lack of thematic consistency. The film isn't sure what it wants to be - Is it a take on acid trips and its effects? Is it about bad parenting? Is it about cheating in relationships? Is it about childhood trauma? The writing tries to dip its paintbrush in all of these buckets, but it doesn't come together in a very satisfying way. But, to the film's credit, the performances (especially Morgan Saylor, who effortlessly swings between sweet, menacing, and sexy) largely cover up for the holes in the plot. The visual effects looked pretty bad in the first act, though when the LSD elements kicked in, I felt the director executed the hallucinatory bits nicely. At least a couple of scenes made me aghast, and that includes a wild raw-dogging bit as well as the gory climax. A twist is revealed almost right before the end credits, and though it made sense from a storytelling standpoint, the ramifications seemed low.

... and I enjoyed it a lot.

First of all, I just like to mention that I wouldn't categorize this as a horror movie, I'd say it is a psychological thriller instead.

A psychological thriller about obsession, cruelty and insanity. Perfect job done by both lead actresses to showcase that, praises to them. Good acting was a vital part to allow this movie to bloom.

Relationships between characters felt so complex and brutal, yet realistic.

I really loved how there were multiple layers of what is going on and how they unraveled painfully and beautifully.

Overall good execution.

Even though I thought I knew exactly where this was all going, the ending got me pleasantly surprised.

"Spoonful of Sugar" succeeds to bring up some questions and thoughts on relationships between parents and their children. Some things to ponder on even after movie ends.