Sundance 2025 Review: Sugar Babies – “Fleit never judges her subjects for their choices.”
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Autumn Johnson and Lillian McCurdy appear in Sugar Babies by Rachel Fleit, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Joseph Yakob and Jacob Yakob.
Ruston, Louisiana is a small city, a population of just over 20,000 and home of Louisiana Tech University. According to the state’s tourism site, it is the peach capital of Louisiana. It is also home to Autumn and her younger sister Hailey who live together in a trailer along with Autumn’s sometime boyfriend, who goes by ‘Mighty.” Along with her friend Lillian (“Bonnie”) they have big dreams of being lawyers, or brain surgeons or of traveling to Japan for a year. But getting out of the poverty-stricken area in which they live is easier said than done.
In Sugar Babies, director Rachel Fleit (Bama Rush, Introducing, Selma Blair) takes us into Autumn’s world amidst a pandemic where most of the jobs in Ruston for women, namely waitressing, have disappeared due to public health measures. This savvy and ambitious young lady refuses to give up. She needs $5700 for school tuition and before that money for food and gas. So she turns to the online world and TikTok and quickly discovers that some well-off men will pay a lot for very little. “Let’s make some money,” she says as her and Bonnie begin live streaming, just sitting and talking. They make $300 in 20 minutes. And business is good. Autumn eventually amasses over 200k followers, making upwards of $6000 a day, not only from the men she messages but now from an online community of other women who also want to learn how to be sugar babies.
Autumn is strict in the beginning to only be a sugar baby without the sugar. She never meets the men she talks to, though it won’t stop her from pretending to get on a plane to have someone pay her extra. I mean if she ‘catches COVID’ and can’t travel they still transfer the cash. It’s easy money for her, though even though she comments that she’s made $100k since starting it’s hard to know where the money has gone as her and her friends still seem to live in an endless cycle of economic turmoil. This despite the fact that she teaches her younger sister how to pull off the same scams and her boyfriend and his friends how to try and use online opportunities to their benefit.
And Fleit makes it easy to feel for, not only these young people, but many of those in Louisiana. For almost a decade their governor has tried to increase the minimum wage in that state to more than $7.25/hr. Even as recently as 2023 his proposed bill outlining an increase failed again. It’s not enough to live off of and many need, at the very least, a side gig to even begin to make ends meet. It would be a compelling investigation, and yet that thread seems to get lost amongst Autumn’s flashy TikTok videos and wasted potential. I suppose it is more entertaining to talk about a forum where you can sell your used underwear and bath water (really?) than to really pursue the underlying causes of why many young people need to go down this potentially dangerous path.
While Fleit never judges her subjects for their choices, it does make you grit your teeth knowing this young woman had a full scholarship to Louisiana State University; that things could have been different for her if only she hadn’t been lured back into Ruston by the strong pull of her family and friends. The dreams they outlined at the beginning of the film are no longer out of reach. Autumn even says she’ll now never leave Ruston unless all of her friends move with her. And that still is a compelling story, how the draw of community factors into the cycle of financial constraint and lack of opportunity for women like Autumn. But instead, it feels like Sugar Babies wades through the shallow end of these issues, never really diving into the details.
Sugar Babies premiered January 27th, 2025 at the Sundance Film Festival. For those in the U.S. it is currently available to stream through the Festival’s site.