Sundance ‘25: Sugar Babies

Documentarian Rachel Fleit is carving out a niche. Her second feature, Bama Rush, took on the viral TikTok trend of University of Alabama sorority rush videos, and in her new film Sugar Babies, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival, Fleit charts the trajectory of a TikTok sugar baby influencer. But while Fleit might have her finger on the pulse of young women’s online virality, her often heavy-handed lens makes strong subject matter feel misused.

Sugar Babies follows college student Autumn and her group of friends in the small town of Ruston, Louisiana. With bills to pay and no job prospects in the economic wasteland of 2020, Autumn turns to online sugar dating and finds wealthy older men willing to give her cash. But Autumn does this without the sugar—never meeting the men on the other side of her phone, just sending selfies, videos and texts in return for anywhere from $10 to $3,000. 

Fleit relies heavily on footage shot by the girls featured in the documentary. The pics and videos Autumn sends to her sugar daddies are blown up onscreen, alongside many, many of the TikToks she makes promoting her side-side hustle offering workshops for girls on how to sugar date. This works the first few times, but starts to feel gimmicky after a while—particularly in an extended sequence set to the meme song “I’m An Accountant,” used as a euphemism for sex work, which could have been funny if it hadn’t been driven into the ground on TikTok four years ago. 

We learn a little about the process of sugaring: Autumn explains how to hint at being a sugar baby on apps like Tinder and MeetMe without violating their anti-solicitation policies. In the classes she offers for $40 a pop, she shares menus for services offered—$10 for a selfie, $20 for phone sex—and how to wordsmith a bio that attracts wealthy customers. And Autumn and her friend Bonnie, who sugar dates online as she prepares to have her first baby, bring in a lot of cash. Autumn rakes in thousands at a time while live-streaming on an app and flashes wads of cash in the TikToks marketing her workshops. 

Fleit tries to balance her focus between the details of Autumn’s self-made business, her relationships with the tight-knit community around her, and the broader economic context of Ruston. In addition to Bonnie, we meet Autumn’s on-and-off-and-on-and-off-again boyfriend Matty, who seems bewildered but generally supportive of her sugaring, and Autumn’s younger sister who sugars with a twist, essentially just scamming men online. Fleit strikes gold with her subjects, who clearly feel comfortable with her: they provide moments of comedic relief and clear-sighted conversations on the reality of the poverty they live in and the constructs keeping them down. In turn, Fleit extends a nonjudgmental look at sex work, giving the girls the space to share how sugaring empowers them to turn the tables on what they see as a patriarchal system keeping them down. 

But while Fleit gestures at larger themes like intergenerational poverty and the failures of the state, Sugar Babies never coheres into something more than the sum of its parts. Throughout the documentary, which is split haphazardly into 6-month and year long chunks, Fleit fills us in on Louisiana’s then-governor John Bel Edward’s repeated failed attempts to raise the state’s minimum wage from $7.25, the federal minimum. These extended newscast segments feel shoehorned in alongside Autumn’s story, instead of being a natural exploration of her environment. 

Adding to the ungraceful construction of the documentary is Fleit’s use of melodramatic imagery. Closeups of American flags and zoom-ins to houses in disrepair show Ruston’s poverty; in one of the only scenes pointing to the risks of online sex work, Fleit shoots Autumn’s first in-person meeting with a sugar daddy like it’s a horror movie, complete with shaky cam footage and a discordant score. Near the end of the documentary, a too-long sequence at a party is filled with slo-mo shots of Autumn and her friends vaping and drinking like they’re in Project X. All of this tonal whiplash creates a choppy storyline, undermining the real economic and personal stakes set up by the documentary.

For a documentary rich with themes to extrapolate beyond its subjects—gig workers and economic security, unregulated sex work and social media—Sugar Babies ends up disappointingly underdeveloped. It’s easy to get invested in Autumn and her friends’ journeys as they adjust to adulthood and struggle to make money, leave Ruston, and build a future for themselves. But with a meandering focus and lack of broader context, Sugar Babies never becomes more than the sum of its parts.

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