I saw this at the Edinburgh film festival. All I gathered from the programme of events was that it began with a woman emerging from a fridge and went from there. For me this initial image itself seemed worth the price of my reduced student ticket alone, so I went in expecting to be baffled, and expecting to have to think, and think I did. Sugar is a film you have to use your imagination to understand. It's art, not in a pretentious way, but in the sense that its images and ideas are not inclined to present themselves within the temporal and spatial framework of the narrative of the real world. And I think, if you're prepared to view it this way, you will, guaranteed, come out with something that you didn't have before.
It taps into a multitude of ideas, most of which have been done before, but never in quite the same way. At moments it felt like a movie about domestic violence. An abused woman taking revenge on her boyfriend by replacing the sugar in a cake with poison. Sometimes it felt like a serial killer movie. The previous tenant of the house seems to be incarcerated behind a grating, and the art direction is as grotesque as anything from Se7en. Then it became a Lynchian meditation on identity. The body behind the grating was at one point the same person as the main character. Again, it reminded me of Polanski's The Tenant. Was the man/woman behind the grating the ghost of the former tenant haunting the new owner surrounded by what might well have been metaphorical clutter.
I enjoyed this film simply because it hinted at so much but confounded nothing. All these interpretations and whatever else anyone might have come up with remained valid beyond the rolling of the credits. If anything though, there was too much there, and the film sometimes felt the equivalent of the filthy, messy apartment. This did however feel quite fitting, and ultimately the film lived up to its title, a slightly sickeningly large dose of refined sugar, that may just have been replaced at times by poison.