Dir: Robert Greene | US 2026
Robert Greene’s Too Much Sugar follows Ryan “Holli-wood” Holliger, a charismatic Missouri father of six children by five different women, as he attempts to make a film about fatherhood with his friend AccRite.
At first, Holliger seems like the kind of character who could carry a documentary simply through personality. He is funny, confident and seemingly comfortable with the contradictions of his life. But as the filming progresses, the easy charm begins to wear thin. The film becomes less about the father he wants to present and more about the responsibilities he has left behind.
Greene is interested in that uncomfortable gap between the way people see themselves and the way their actions look to everyone else. His camera stays close, allowing moments of humour and tenderness to sit alongside some much harder truths.
The film’s most interesting element is that the documentary itself becomes part of the confrontation. Holliger isn’t simply being observed: he is participating in the construction of his own image. Gradually, that process begins to expose things he may not have intended to reveal.
Greene avoids turning the story into a straightforward tale of redemption. There is no easy transformation, and that restraint gives the film considerably more weight. What begins as a portrait of an exuberant, complicated man becomes something more uncomfortable: a study of masculinity, responsibility and the stories we tell ourselves to live with our choices.
Too Much Sugar is at its best when it trusts those contradictions rather than trying to resolve them. The result is an intimate and sometimes unsettling portrait of a man discovering that being a father and imagining yourself as one are not necessarily the same thing.
VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2026