Sugarland

"The result of the discovery of art by an unsophisticated mind... The first attempts to be consciously literary are always productive of the most elaborate artificiality."

• Aldous Huxley

Few things in the world of contemporary cinema are more offensive than the hollow self-aggrandizement of a pseudo-artist who confuses stillness with subtlety, silence with soul, and emptiness with meaning. Sugarland, the feature debut of Isabella Brunäcker, is exactly that: a monument to affectation, a vacuum of narrative, and an insult to both cinema and the viewer's intelligence. It is the perfect case study in what happens when unchecked ego and aesthetic mimicry collide with no actual substance behind the lens.

A Film About Nothing, Made by Someone Who Has Nothing to Say: Sugarland bills itself as minimalist. But minimalism, in the hands of a real artist, is purposeful, think Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry. In Sugarland, minimalism is an excuse. It is the screen behind which Brunäcker hides her complete lack of insight, experience, or vision. The film consists largely of wide, static shots of two moderately attractive young people saying very little, doing even less, and achieving even less still. One might argue it's a mood piece except there's no mood. Only apathy.

Brunäcker clearly wants to be seen. Seen as serious, as profound, as artistic. She has seen Bergman, she has seen Akerman, perhaps she's read a line or two of Susan Sontag or seen a YouTube video essay on slow cinema. But the result is not homage it's a lazy collage of borrowed aesthetic codes, stripped of context or purpose, slapped onto a barren script like a child gluing feathers to cardboard and calling it a bird.

Every frame of Sugarland reeks of someone trying to get noticed, not someone trying to tell a story. It is a cinematic Instagram post: curated to the point of sterility, empty yet screaming for attention. The long, languid takes of the protagonists sitting in silence, framed just-so, betray a deep desire to appear meaningful, not to be meaningful.

Brunäcker belongs to the growing cult of filmmakers whose primary artistic project is their own persona. She does not make films; she makes mirrors, each polished to reflect back the image of a serious European artist™ that she wishes to project. This is ego masquerading as empathy with human situations. Which she clearly has none of. It is painfully evident in every static frame and every fake-deep silence that she is not interested in humanity, only in the projection of her own genius.

The film's pseudo-intellectual minimalism is a defense mechanism it's how bad filmmakers hide their ignorance behind "intentional ambiguity." The narrative is little more than an IKEA version of Before Sunrise, stripped of charm, chemistry, or emotional resonance. Brunäcker's Iga and Caple's Ethan mumble about their inner wounds in ways so noncommittal they might as well be reading shampoo bottles. Their interactions don't reveal layers, they reveal a script that's terrified of saying anything concrete in case it's revealed to be banal. Which it is.

Aldous Huxley nailed it nearly a century ago: there is something uniquely embarrassing about the artificiality that emerges when an unsophisticated mind tries to be artistic. Sugarland is drenched in this artifice. It reeks of a filmmaker who believes that poetic depth is simply the absence of clarity. That a camera left rolling for three minutes is always better than a story told plainly. She has nothing to say besides begging to be called an artist by her peers.

Brunäcker, like so many of today's fake directors, has confused opacity for profundity. Her camera lingers not to evoke emotion, but because she doesn't know what to do next. Her dialogue is sparse not because she trusts the visual language, but because she has nothing to say. And her characters are enigmas not because they are complex, but because they are blank slates painted in the thin watercolor of her unformed ideas.

We have cultivated a culture where depth is judged not by insight, but by inertia. Where the mere posture of seriousness is enough to fool an audience trained to associate boredom with brilliance. It is a post modern vaccum, allowed by the permission of thee lack of talent to enter the art world after people started selling cans of feces in art galleries as if they were art. Roger Scruton saw this a long time ago.

This is what the worst kind of film festivals reward: empty formalism draped in sepia tones, shot on 16mm to simulate texture, (oh, analogue film making, how genuine she is! Pre-teen-tious, empty, fake, image obsessed and false. Mommy I want to be vintage because I am old school and profound. No, you are not. You are a sample of what art school does to an ego centered person infatuated with herself) and presented with buzzwords like "minimalist," "introspective," or "elliptical." All of it is camouflage. The truth is that Sugarland is not an exploration of human connection it's an exploration of one young woman's attempt to brand herself as a visionary and an artist, someone who is "better" than others, without having anything visionary to say.

Let's be clear: Isabella Brunäcker is not Truffaut, she is not Kiarostami, she is not even Sofia Coppola on an off day. She is part of a long, tiresome lineage of privileged dilettantes with access to cameras and enough confidence to call themselves auteurs and none of the insight or emotional depth that lends actual weight to the films of true artists. She doesn't care about people. She cares about herself, and her social image.

The before mentioned Roger Scruton, one of the most incisive cultural critics of the 20th century, warned with devastating clarity that postmodernism would lead not to liberation, but to decadence, a collapse of standards disguised as experimentation. In his documentaries and writings, particularly Why Beauty Matters (BBC, 2009), Scruton lamented how the death of aesthetic judgment gave rise to a kind of nihilism in the arts, where anything - even a can of excrement (Piero Manzoni's 1961), could be considered profound, so long as it was labeled as conceptual. This opening of the floodgates allowed for a generation of what Scruton called "fake artists", charlatans hiding behind pseudo theory and "transgression" while lacking even a trace of craftsmanship, moral vision, or authentic emotion or craftsmanship. Sugarland is the cinematic offspring of that lineage.

In films like Sugarland, we witness the postmodernist impulse in full decay: storytelling is deemed too conventional, so it is stripped away; she doesn't have the capacity to tell a story or develop an honest narrative, so the result is vacuous aesthetic gestures posing as depth. Brunäcker's long, static shots of gas stations and silent car rides, her refusal to offer coherent emotional arcs, and her fetishization of silence, are not signs of narrative restraint or sensibility, they are symptoms of a deeper cultural illness Scruton foresaw: the elevation of the auteur's narcissism over the audience's human experience. As scholar Suzy Gablik also observed in Has Modernism Failed?, postmodern art frequently replaces meaningful communication with irony and spectacle, reducing art to a series of self-referential gestures that serve only to glorify the artist's identity. Sugarland is exactly this kind of indulgence, a film so afraid to say something real that it says nothing at all, and cloaks this cowardice in the language of minimalism and ambiguity.

What Scruton saw. And what Sugarland proves, is that once the artist's duty to beauty, form, and truth is abandoned, art becomes not a window to the world, but a mirror held up to the artist's own ego. And when critics, festivals, and institutions reward such fakery under the banner of innovation, they become complicit in turning cinema into a playground of the untalented, a gallery of silence, stillness, and narrative absence where vision used to be.

Sugarland isn't about people. It isn't about love, or loneliness, or redemption.

It's about Isabella Brunäcker pretending to be an artist while using camera mannerisms and desperately wanting to be called deep, and, above all, a profound artists, which she is not. And that's not enough.

In this new cultural vacuum, according to Linda Hutcheon in Narcissistic Narrative (Hutcheon, 1980), works became self-obsessed, self-reflexive, and intentionally void of meaning - aesthetic shells built not for communication but for the self-congratulation of the artist.

Isabella Brunäcker's Sugarland is a textbook case of this disease. As explored in Matthew Denny's thesis The Postmodern Auteur: A Contradiction in Terms (Denny, 2015), the so-called auteur in the postmodern era no longer provides vision or authorship in the classical sense, instead, they act as brand managers of ambiguity. Brunäcker's minimalist, affectless camera work, her refusal to engage with character psychology, and the absolute absence of narrative structure are not hallmarks of subtlety, but signs of creative cowardice hiding behind the veil of "interpretive openness." As Francesco Pagello notes in Quentin Tarantino and Film Theory, postmodern cinema often glorifies "emptiness and narcissism" under the guise of aesthetic innovation (Pagello, 2020).

This degeneration is further underlined in Postmodern Narrative Cinema by C. Sharrett, who writes that postmodern works reduce characters to mere "mirrors" for the filmmaker's own preoccupations - a critique that Sugarland exemplifies in its obsession with monotone stillness, meaningless gazes, and conversations that serve no one but the director's projected persona (Sharrett, 1988). The road trip in Sugarland is not a journey; it's a stall. A dead-end journey through Isabella Brunäcker's desperate need to be applauded as an auteur without ever earning the title.

Stay away if you value your time.