'Sugar' is sweet then rotten noir
Apple TV+’s latest is an incredible noir… until it tries to be more than that
“Ostensibly, Sugar is about finding the missing granddaughter of a famous director, in a case that looks simple but invariably gets darker and more complex as it goes on. But this is just a plot scaffold. “When I was shooting, I wasn’t that interested in Olivia’s disappearance,” Meirelles says. “I was much more interested in knowing who this Sugar is. He’s the mystery.”
That would work if that interest didn’t become so obvious and all-consuming as the story goes on; and if it was heading somewhere interesting. Unfortunately, Sugar’s secrets are where the show drifts sharpest away from noir, and ultimately, off a cliff. Put simply, there’s a late-season twist, which I won’t ruin for you, but spoiled the show for me. A rewatch gives a sense of what they were trying to do, but it just doesn’t land. The reveal is so easy, so convenient, and so much worse than other possible explanations — including one speculated by Amy Ryan’s character at one point. There are red flags (aka “clues”) for this throughout, but you try to dismiss them, thinking, “no, they won’t go that way.” And then they do. And I swore aloud to myself when they did”
Out now in The Spectator: my review/preview of Apple TV+’s Sugar, including quotes from my interview with it’s director, Fernando Meirelles. Read it now!