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The sugar factory

Threat advisory: Elevated - Significant risk of entertaining activities

Movie propaganda

Harris Berne (Matt Day) was not an average kid. As a 5-year-old his favourite activity was pounding sandstone to fine grain under his parents' house - making sugar. His favourite toy was a galvanised bolt. And for years he's been haunted by voices and visions.

At 17 he's still different, and he's in love with a divorced woman (Rhondda Findleton) whose children he baby sits. But when her young daughter dies in an accident under his care, the relationship inevitably disintegrates.

Harris is distraught, but his pain surfaces in strange ways. finally, when he shocks guests at his brother's wedding reception with behaviour not entirely appropriate to the occasion, his family decides it's time to seek professional help.

Intelligence analyst

Special Agent Matti

Theatrical report

Go Matt!

Somewhere along the way Matt Day chopped 10 years off his age and became an angst-ridden adolescent. And his acting is as good and occasionally better than it ever was. Playing nutters is always a delicate balance between having to be normal enough to communicate with the audience and abnormal enough to be nutty. Not many actors do this at all well, but Matt is king in this film, being both the incredibly mediocre boy next door and the wacko who pissed on his brother's wedding guests. He is aided and abetted in this by looking particularly innocent (especially as he knocked 20 or 30 kilos off for this role).

The actors who aren't Matt are generally ok. Eliot Paton and Eliza O'Donoghue as the children Julius and Clementine are excellent: open, honest and intense. Michela Noonan, Glen Shea and Sam Healy are great troubled teenagers (with whom Harris stays in a halfway house), but Tony Hayes' performance as troubled and dangerous teenager Marlo is stilted and unbelievable. John Waters as the psychiatrist is unnecessarily over the top - he is not helped by his character being even more troubled than the teenagers in his care.

Now, what else happened? Oh yes, there was a story. it's a dark tale of suburban horror: lawnmowers, family skeletons, marriage for all the wrong reasons. Harris is the innocent caught up in the twisted web of deceit and pain that is the traditional nuclear family. His descent into madness is a gradual one - as twisted as the life his family leads, yet so insidiously sneaky that even realising that he is kooky is beyond him. It's great.

The sugar factory is not all doom and gloom - there is a lot of humour from Matt and Harris, especially in Harris' twisted perception of the oh, so normal world in which he exists. And there's a satisfactory ending that is neither too bleak nor too happy. (If you want to know, he finds out the dark secret that's been haunting him all his life, solves the world's problems then gets together with the woman.)

I commend you to watch this film.

Security censorship classification

MA 15+ (Adult themes)

Not for public release in Australia before date

Film: 24 November 1999