Spoonful of Sugar Plot Summary
Currently streaming on Shudder, Spoonful of Sugar tells the story of a 21-year-old medical student named Millicent who takes a break from her studies to care for a young boy named Johnny.
The boy’s parents, Jacob and Rebecca, are glad of her help, as she is quickly able to connect with their uncommunicative son. However, Millicent has a secret – she is addicted to LSD – which is something that she probably didn’t put on her resume!
But this isn’t the only secret Millicent is keeping. And it turns out that the family she is supporting have secrets too!
So, what are these dark secrets? Let’s take a closer look at the movie:
Why does Millicent care for Johnny?
After seeing an ad asking for a babysitter for Johnny, who has severe allergies, Millicent decides to respond.
She is writing a thesis on children with severe allergies so she applies for the job, as she thinks the experience will be good for her studies. But due to her fragile mental state, it’s clear that her reasons for caring for Johnny go beyond her academic work.
After years of suffering abuse while in the foster care system, she has an affinity for children who have been badly looked after. When she recognizes the failings of Johnny’s mom, Millicent starts to believe she will be the ‘perfect mother’ for the boy and quickly tries to become his main carer by forcing her way into the family.
How does Millicent force her way into the family?
After discovering the dead animals that Johnny has buried in the garden, Millicent starts to bond with him by showing him how to skin a rabbit. Johnny has likely killed these animals himself which is a precursor for events later in the movie when we discover how violent he can be. Millicent has no trouble handling dead creatures and getting her hands covered in blood, which is presumably why Johnny starts to feel an affinity towards her.
She later adds LSD to Johnny’s medication as she thinks this will bring him to her level of psychosis. This apparently works as the two start to develop an even closer bond. At one point, he even calls Millicent “mommy” – the first word he has ever spoken – which infuriates Rebecca, who thought her son was speaking to her before realizing the truth.
After winning over Johnny, Millicent then turns her attention to Jacob by seducing him. This is the next step in her plan to replace Rebecca in the household.
Johnny sees the two of them together and is initially traumatized by their sexual act. To free this image of them from his mind, he starts to draw sketches depicting Millicent and Jacob having sex. These are later found by an understandably angry Rebecca.
How does Rebecca respond?
Enough is enough for Rebecca! Not only has the new sitter replaced her as mom in her son’s eyes but she has also been doing naughty things with her husband in the garden.
She bans Millicent from the house but the sitter isn’t going anywhere. After attacking Rebecca at the front door, Millicent rushes to Jacob’s shed to declare her love for him and to convince him to ditch his wife. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the same feelings that she has for him and tells her so.
While this is going on, Johnny and Rebecca are inside the house. The boy stabs his mom through the hand with a knife that Millicent previously gave him with instructions to kill his mother.
Hell hath no fury than a mother stabbed! After surviving this brutal attack, Rebecca goes after Millicent and attacks her on the porch.
Unable to overpower Rebecca, Millicent falls to the ground and looks to Johnny for help. With knife in hand, the boy reacts but not in the way Millicent had hoped.
What does Johnny do?
Despite becoming attached to Millicent, Johnny turns on her with the knife. He stabs her repeatedly until she is dead.
Why did Johnny kill her? It might be that he recognized that she wasn’t his mother after all and so decided to murder her for daring to take his mom’s place. It might also be that he was high on LSD at the time, so was out of his mind and unable to think clearly.
However, it would appear that this wasn’t the first time Johnny had killed somebody. Following Millicent’s death, the dark secrets about Johnny’s past are revealed.
What dark secrets are revealed?
Towards the end of the movie, we discover Millicent’s dark secret. We see her flicking through a journal containing the names of the various foster fathers that she had killed. This is after we see her kill her current foster dad who, like the others, tried to force himself onto her sexually.
It’s little wonder that Millicent became mentally unstable. The abuse she experienced led to her dependency on drugs, her motivation for wanting to help neglected youngsters, and the deranged mental state that caused her to become a serial killer.
It turns out that Millicent wasn’t the only serial killer in the movie.
It would appear that Johnny also had a history of committing murder. At the end of the movie, we see the bodies of other sitters that he had killed and that had been buried by his parents underground.
Why would Johnny kill them? Presumably because of his violent tendencies. We already know that he enjoyed killing animals so killing humans was probably the obvious next step. It’s a surprise that he killed Millicent as the two seemed very close but perhaps this closeness was the trigger for his urge to kill.
There is very little backstory for Johnny, so it’s unclear why he would be so violent. Perhaps his parents drove him to murder because of their neglect or lack of understanding about his needs. Or perhaps there are other reasons for his murderous tendencies. If you have theories of your own, please let us know your thoughts by leaving us a comment below.
Read More: Spoonful Of Sugar Movie Review
The child is on the Low end of the Autism spectrum and experiences violent behaviors. I have seen this first hand. That also is why he is non-verbal. The LSD is similar to people using CBD and seeing an improvement in speech and faculties. Not sure if the science is solid on that. However unless you give the kid a knife you probably won’t get cut and it would me more flailing than repeated stabs to one location. Disturbing yes for those dealing with this reality but not the murder parts. I did like another person’s comment about the lack of police for missing babysitters. Lol!
Just a horror movie trying to do something different and make a few bucks. It’s a movie – don’t read into police not being able to follow-up on previous babysitters, whether they were satan worshippers/witches, or if these non-psychologist movie producers are way off-base . . . and the list could go on. At end of the day, it’s a B-movie but entertaining enough to watch the unlikely situation all the way to the end.
I figured that Johnny resented the babysitters and his father for doing the dirty deeds behind his mother’s back and in front of him. He seemed to always have the lashings out when that stuff was happening. So for me, the dad is the absolute worst here and the biggest reason for all the events. What weirds me out is even the mother doesn’t seem to care all that much about the dad’s infidelity. She never confronts him or says anything to him about it. 🤷♀️ All in all, a bizarre movie that I can’t say I enjoyed.
Just a bad movie. That idea that they were witches or satan worshippers would fill on some very big holes…but then why would the parents, who are witches, be terrified of their own child and be abused by him so much?
TOO MANY opposing scenes in the movie…it doesn’t make sense, any of it.
SPOILER
Did EVERY babysitter not have a family. Detectives are actually not idiots and I’m guessing the family of the other babysitters would have let police know about the family.
Why was the kid a monster? Is he satan? Is he just a born serial killer? Did he learn it from his mom or both parents?
Just garbage in the end
perhaps: The previous babysitters represent the cyclical nature of sexual desire, violence and death. In enlightenment, the rabbits become fertile in the killer’s mind Representing ego death. Social constructs of the nuclear family, original sin, good/evil dissolve through psychotherapy.
Either the parents were witches, or Milli. And the boy was the spawn of Satan. If not Satan himself. You catch a glimpse of this magic when drunken Jacob stumbled into the hallway where Millicent was, and in the heat of seduction you see a brief exchange from I think Jacob’s mouth of some kind of ‘magic breathe’ into Millicent. I want to note the name similarity of Millicent and Maleficent. The usage of apples in this film is possibly symbolic to the Greek Goddess Aphrodite. That might be a stretch. Looking back to the story of Snow White, within that tale a witch has its use for an apple to poison Snow White. During Millicents LSD trips, we catch glimpses of a horned creature seducing her to her very liking. There are simply too many symbolic references that alluded to there being a witch or(witches). My first best guess is Milli was a witch. My second is all three were witches, and Johnny the Spawn of Satan. Definitely witches