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 contemporary cinema are more offensive than the hollow self-aggrandizement of a work that 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 a case study in what happens when unchecked aesthetic mimicry collides with a lack of substance.

A Film About Nothing, Made of Nothing: Sugarland bills itself as minimalist. But minimalism, in the hands of a true artist, is purposeful. Think Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, where silence and restraint deepen meaning. In Sugarland, minimalism is not an artistic choice but an excuse, a curtain behind which there is nothing. The film is a series of static wide shots in which two young people drift aimlessly, saying little, doing less, and achieving nothing. One might call it a mood piece, but there is no mood - only apathy.

What the film borrows from the likes of Bergman or Akerman are only surface codes, stripped of their original context or purpose. It is not homage but imitation, a hollow collage of gestures glued onto a barren script. Like a child pasting feathers on cardboard and declaring it a bird, Sugarland mistakes mimicry for creation.

Every frame feels curated for effect rather than infused with insight. Long takes of characters sitting in silence, framed just so, cry out for recognition as profound, while in truth they are sterile, empty, and screaming only for attention. This is not cinema as storytelling; it is cinema as branding.

The film's pseudo-intellectual minimalism functions as a shield. It hides ignorance behind "intentional ambiguity." The narrative is little more than a flat-pack Before Sunrise, drained of charm, chemistry, or emotional resonance. Characters mumble about their wounds with such detachment they could be reciting from product labels. These scenes reveal not hidden depths, but a script terrified of saying anything concrete, because the banal would be exposed.

Huxley's warning rings true here. The elaborate artificiality of an unsophisticated mind trying to be profound saturates Sugarland. Its entire aesthetic suggests that depth is achieved by refusing clarity, that a three-minute shot of nothing is inherently superior to a well-told story.

Like much postmodern art, Sugarland confuses opacity with profundity. Its lingering shots do not evoke emotion but betray indecision. Its sparse dialogue is not a matter of trusting the visual, but an inability to say anything meaningful. Its characters are not complex enigmas but blank slates, painted thinly with unformed ideas.

We live in a culture where audiences are trained to confuse boredom with brilliance, where the mere posture of seriousness substitutes for depth. Sugarland is a direct product of that vacuum - the same cultural collapse that Roger Scruton identified when conceptual art began selling cans of excrement as profundity. It is not coincidence that this film, like so many of its ilk, is celebrated by festivals: institutions eager to reward empty formalism draped in nostalgic textures and described with buzzwords like "elliptical" and "introspective."

The truth is simpler: Sugarland is not an exploration of human connection. It is an exercise in surface, a film more concerned with appearing visionary than with vision itself.

Roger Scruton warned that postmodernism leads not to liberation but to decadence: a collapse of standards masked as innovation. In Why Beauty Matters (BBC, 2009), he exposed how aesthetic judgment had been abandoned in favor of nihilism, where even a can of excrement (Piero Manzoni's Artist's Excrement 1961) could be sanctified as profound. Sugarland belongs to this lineage, where "art" is stripped of craftsmanship, moral vision, and genuine human emotion.

The result is not storytelling but avoidance. Its road trip is not a journey but a stall, a detour into nothingness. Its silences are not pregnant with meaning but barren. As Suzy Gablik argued in Has Modernism Failed?, postmodern art often replaces communication with spectacle, reducing works to self-referential gestures. Matthew Denny's The Postmodern Auteur: A Contradiction in Terms makes the same point: the auteur here is not an author but a brand manager of ambiguity. Sugarland exemplifies that contradiction, offering vacuous gestures in place of narrative vision.

C. Sharrett, in Postmodern Narrative Cinema, noted how postmodern works reduce characters to mirrors of the filmmaker's preoccupations. Sugarland reflects exactly this: monotone stillness, meaningless gazes, conversations that serve no one but the film's projection of its own self-image.

What Scruton foresaw, and what Sugarland proves, is that when art abandons truth, beauty, and human connection, it ceases to be a window to the world and becomes only a mirror held up to its own emptiness. Critics and institutions that reward such fakery are complicit in turning cinema into a playground of the untalented, a gallery of silence and inertia where vision should be.

Sugarland is not about people, not about love, not about loneliness, not about redemption. It is about cinema pretending to be art, while offering nothing but a hollow echo of seriousness. And that is not enough.

Stay away if you value your time.