★★★              By Ambrose Vok                    February 10, 2090

One of the biggest red flags a studio can put on its movie is not holding press screenings for the film. This almost always means the studio knows their film is hot garbage and wants to prevent word of that fact getting out for as long as possible. Given the nature of the film which Pepsi-Huawei-Tampax-Applebee’s-Charmin Studios releases this weekend and the studio’s body of work as of late, I was disappointed, but not altogether surprised, that the studio declined to provide advance screenings. Being the consummate rookie of the Pondering Cosmo Film Desk, responsibility for this film was foisted on me, and I had to brave the unspeakable horror of going to a film screening with members of the public in order to do my job. (There were only four other people in my auditorium, but that was still more than enough for their plebeian stench to suffocate me. The horror, I tell you.) Having seen the film, I now stand thoroughly perplexed, not regarding the film itself, but as to why the studio thought so little of this film that they buried it in the same weekend as the newest Hotdog Higgins movie with no press screenings. Milk Me Sugar is by no means an artistic milestone, but it is quite decent and surprisingly creative, which marks a major breath of fresh air for its studio.

The premise of Milk Me Sugar is by no means inspired: it’s another milk goblin movie. Yes, even after fifteen years studios are still trying to beat the dead horse of a subgenre that has been thoroughly run into the ground and was never that interesting to begin with. We have seen time and time again all of the ways that goblins will rise from out of your milk carton after it goes bad and beat you up. We have seen it done as a splatter horror movie, as a paranoia thriller, as an anime, as a German folk tale, as a Fursploitation film, as an adorable children’s cartoon. We have seen milk goblins appear in Prohibition Chicago, the Crusades, the Potato-Catnip Crisis, the crucifixion of Jesus. We have gotten origin stories about the milk goblins originating from a cow cursed by a dybbuk, and films from the perspective of the milk goblins that try to humanize (or goblinize?) them as antiheroes who are just very fervently committed to making sure people get their calcium intake. There is no more ground to tread with milk goblins, and the fact that Milk Me Sugar got made is just a studio trying to squeeze a few extra dollars out of the phenomenon. Or so I thought. But remarkably, Milk Me Sugar is a film with some life in it, and it manages this by making a very simple change to the milk goblin formula: instead of beating people up as the milk goblins usually do, they now engage entirely in emotional abuse.

The progress the film makes on account of that simple change is remarkable. The clearest area of improvement is with the goblins themselves. Milk goblin films have always hinged on the performances of the actors playing the goblins, whether they play the role in a body suit as a physically imposing dairy monster or voice act as a seductively lactating waifu. But this expressiveness can only go so far when the ultimate function of the milk goblins is just to silently kick and punch the film’s protagonists. But by turning the milk goblins into emotional abusers, where they torment our main characters, the Gulchy family, by triggering one father’s PTSD from the Saturnian War and convincing him that he is to blame for his platoon’s deaths, spilling jizzucinos on the children’s art projects, but only enough that the children will know it is tarnished even though no one else will notice, or calling the other father’s office to accuse him of sexual assault, the fiendish personalities of the milk goblins, here played in motion capture by Tanisha McKivitz, Archibald Stegosaurus VI, and Pip Dickman, are really given the opportunity to shine through.

The film is directed by Fifé Seguanda, who has in her brief career operated mostly on a gun-for-hire basis, doing thankless jobs where she takes orders from a boardroom and tries to translate their riddlelike instructions into actual cinematic coherence. Her job is to be completely unheard of when a film she does goes well and a scapegoat when it doesn’t. It’s not a path in the film industry that allows one to really exercise creative muscles. But here, it is clear that Ms. Seguanda has talent and ideas. The cinematography, though conventional, is nevertheless expressive; the camera moves with a tangible energy and colors pop off the screen. There is quite a bit of wry humor in the film that includes real visual and editing gags instead of forced pop culture references. There is a sense here, more so than in most studio movies of late, that there is an actual person by the camera, that what we see on screen was conceived by a human being.

Now despite how encouraging this all is, the film does still have its limits. Being a film produced under the Pepsi-Huawei-Tampax-Applebee’s-Charmin “process” and with the milk goblin premise puts a hard cap on how good the film can really be, no matter how admirably its creatives strive to improve it. For one thing, the film’s title is quite perplexing. It would seem to be an allusion to a famous passage in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, but nothing in the film seems to indicate that there is any intentional connection between the two. Perhaps a comma was accidentally dropped after the second word, and the title is meant to be an imperative innuendo. It sort of seems like whoever came up with the title just started with the word “milk” and then selected at random some other words that would form a phrase that approximates sense.

On a more substantial level, all the characters in the film outside of the actual goblins are quite shallow. The main characters do not feel like real people so much as objects specifically designed for the milk goblins to emotionally tear apart. In a film that highlights the goblins, this is not such a bad thing, but it means the film really comes up flat when it asks us to actually care about the people in the Gulchy family. These films are based around the satisfaction of watching milk goblins utterly destroy the lives of people who do not pay enough attention to expiration dates, so any attempts at sentimentality are unwelcome. When these kinds of films work, which is not very often, it is because they are demented films for demented people. For all that Milk Me Sugar does right, it still does not quite understand that.

Nevertheless, relative to my expectations, Milk Me Sugar is an extremely pleasant surprise. Studio filmmaking is currently at a nadir unlike anything anyone currently alive has seen, and so even a modest success such as this is a needed ray of light. The growing trend of the behind-closed-doors processes that the major studios have let totally dictate their films leads to the increasing depersonalization of cinema, where films are increasingly only commercial products and all individual expression is being eradicated. But here, the talented humans behind the making of the film shine through. Why Pepsi-Huawei-Tampax-Applebee’s-Charmin Studios was so afraid of this film to bury it as they did is a mystery to me. All I can tell the studio executives (in the counterfactual world where they are listening) is that whatever they did with this film, please do more of that.