Review: Saccharine Makes Food Feel Like the Monster

By Devin Smock, MoreHorror.com

SPOILERS THROUGHOUT

Early in Saccharine, Hana throws a box of doughnuts into the trash and tries to make them inedible. Then she looks back at the trash.

I love that moment because Natalie Erika James shoots it almost like Hana is being stalked in a slasher movie. Somewhere down there, beneath the garbage, a doughnut is waiting. Patient. Quiet. Ready to strike.

It’s funny until it isn’t, which pretty much describes a lot of Saccharine.

James, who also directed Relic and Apartment 7A, takes something painfully ordinary, our endless ability to make ourselves miserable over food and our bodies, and turns it into supernatural body horror. Hana, played by Midori Francis, is a medical student trapped in a cycle of binge eating, guilt, exercise and promises that this time she’s finally going to get everything under control.

Then she discovers a miracle weight-loss drug called the Gray. Naturally, it’s made from human ashes.

Because apparently Ozempic wasn’t horrifying enough.

Hana can’t afford the real thing, but being a medical student gives her access to a laboratory and, more importantly, a donated cadaver her classmates have rather cruelly nicknamed Big Bertha. So she does what any rational person would do and starts manufacturing her own diet pills from a dead woman.

This goes badly.

Saccharine isn’t subtle about what it’s doing. This is a horror movie about fad diets, body dysmorphia, eating disorders, social-media fitness culture and our willingness to do increasingly insane things if somebody promises that afterward we’ll finally like what we see in the mirror.

I’m okay with that. Body horror has never exactly been famous for whispering.

What I appreciate is how often James finds actual cinematic ways to communicate those ideas instead of only putting them into dialogue. The film was shot by Charlie Sarroff, and visually it’s one of the stronger things about it. The color palette has this attractive, slightly artificial sweetness to it, which makes the uglier imagery underneath feel even worse.

Food is photographed beautifully until suddenly it isn’t. A piece of cake can look delicious in one shot and disturbingly anatomical in the next. Human tissue starts resembling food. Food starts looking like something pulled out of a body. The movie keeps blurring appetite and disgust until eventually your stomach doesn’t quite know which signal it’s supposed to be receiving.

The binge-eating sequences are where that works best. They’re gross, but not cartoon gross. Uncomfortably intimate gross.

The camera gets close to Hana’s mouth. Crumbs, grease, chewing, swallowing. Food piled onto more food. There’s a desperation to it that makes the scenes difficult to watch, which is exactly why they work. You’re not supposed to sit there thinking, “Man, that looks good.” You’re watching somebody lose control.

The editing helps enormously. Sean Lahiff cuts the movie with a kind of rhythmic aggression that occasionally reminded me of Edgar Wright, although without going anywhere near Wright’s level of stylistic insanity. What I liked is that James doesn’t save the fast, associative cutting for one clever montage. That visual grammar keeps appearing throughout the movie. Food, exercise, bodies, medical imagery and consumption start crashing into one another.

Sometimes Saccharine understands that one cut can say more than another page of dialogue.

Then there’s Bertha.

Bertha is haunting. After Hana begins consuming her remains, the dead woman starts appearing around her, but James gives the haunting a clever rule: Hana initially sees Bertha through convex reflective surfaces. The back of a spoon. A kettle. Curved reflections that distort whatever they show.

That’s one of my favorite ideas in the movie. You’re making a film about body dysmorphia, and your ghost can only be seen through distorted reflections.

There you go. You don’t need a character to explain that one to me.

The movie also has fun making ordinary food threatening. There are moments where Hana looks at discarded food with the same dread another horror protagonist might reserve for a masked killer standing at the end of the hallway. Even the building’s garbage area becomes threatening, with Bertha seeming to infect the trash itself. The movie has already established the chute and garbage as extensions of Hana’s relationship with consumption, so bringing Bertha into that environment feels appropriately disgusting. 

The food is coming for her, and in a way, it is.

The effects are more complicated. I know what an impossible job body transformation makeup can be. I’m reluctant to beat up practical-effects artists because those departments are routinely handed assignments that amount to, “Please fundamentally change this recognizable human body and make sure nobody notices how you did it.”

Good luck.

But the heavier-body prosthetics in Saccharine don’t always work for me. There are moments where I stop seeing Hana and start seeing the effect. Jawlines, folds and proportions occasionally look artificial enough that they pull me out of what Midori Francis is doing. The same problem becomes even more noticeable later with Hana’s father.

And Bertha herself, at certain angles, starts reminding me a little of Butterball from Hellraiser.

I don’t necessarily mean that as an insult.

Butterball is creepy.

But once that association entered my brain it never completely left.

The cadaver work occasionally has the opposite problem. Some of those exposed ribs look less like a medical-school dissection and more like somebody ordered baby backs.

Maybe I was hungry.

Probably not the ideal movie for that.

Francis is very good, though. She keeps Hana from becoming nothing more than a delivery system for the movie’s metaphor. Hana is smart enough to understand that what she’s doing is insane, which makes watching her continue doing it more interesting.

That’s addiction. Knowing better isn’t the same thing as stopping.

There’s also Alanya, played by Madeleine Madden, the fitness instructor Hana is attracted to. The movie uses that attraction as another piece of Hana’s confusion over her body: does she want Alanya, does she want to look like Alanya, or has she mashed those two desires together so completely that she can’t separate them anymore?

Initially, I wasn’t convinced the relationship needed as much screen time as it gets. There are stretches where it feels like the movie is stopping to explain an insecurity the horror imagery has already communicated more effectively.

By the ending, though, I understood the choice better.

Saccharine has been connecting sex, appetite, attraction and consumption from the beginning. During the earlier intimate material with Alanya, James plays with that discomfort, framing desire in a way that makes you briefly wonder whether Hana wants to sleep with this woman or eat her.

Sexually.

Hopefully.

That becomes considerably less funny by the end.

Before we get there, the movie begins spinning its wheels. At nearly two hours, it repeats itself. Hana binges. Bertha appears. Hana tries to regain control. Hana binges again. Bertha appears again. The repetition has a thematic justification because compulsive behavior is repetitive by definition, and I understand the argument that making the audience feel trapped in the cycle is part of the point.

I still felt the repetition.

A movie can have a reason for being exhausting and still exhaust me. There are stretches where Saccharine has already made its point but keeps chewing.

Sorry. Had to.

The family material gives the movie more weight. Hana’s mother is thin, attentive and constantly hovering. Her father, Travis, is severely obese and largely removed from the world around him. Eventually it becomes clear that Hana’s relationship with food and weight isn’t something she picked up from an Instagram ad last Tuesday. She has been absorbing this stuff her entire life.

The reveal of her father worked for me because suddenly Hana’s fixation has history. She isn’t merely afraid of being fat. She’s afraid of becoming him.

That is much uglier and more emotionally complicated.

The same thing happens when the movie finally gives Bertha back her humanity.

Her name is Grace.

For a while I had this additional sadness about the cadavers, imagining these people ending up in a medical lab because they had no money, no family or nowhere else to go. But that isn’t actually what the movie says. The memorial later makes clear that these people chose to donate their bodies to medical education. They willingly became what the professor calls the students’ “silent teachers.” 

That makes what Hana does to Grace worse, not better.

Grace gave her body for people to learn from. Hana turns it into a weight-loss supplement.

And when Josie learns about the actual woman behind Big Bertha, we find out Grace spent much of her life caring for others, struggled with her own relationship with food and never really found peace with herself. Suddenly she isn’t the giant scary corpse anymore. She was a person whom a room full of medical students reduced to a nickname because of her size. 

There’s something genuinely sad in that.

The film seems to offer her a kind of peace eventually.

I guess.

Because this is still a horror movie, and peace apparently requires a considerable amount of screaming, garbage and amateur abdominal surgery.

The final stretch is where Saccharine wakes itself back up. Hana discovers that she has a small benign growth on her pancreas in the same location where Grace’s cancer began and becomes convinced that cutting it out will sever their connection. Her doctor advises against surgery, so Hana decides to handle the situation herself. Because medical school apparently teaches confidence if nothing else. 

It’s ridiculous.

It’s also effective.

Watching Hana drug herself and essentially race against time to cut a growth from her own pancreas while Bertha closes in is the kind of heightened body-horror lunacy I wanted a little more of earlier in the movie. The sequence understands that by this point realism has packed its bags and left, so you might as well commit.

James commits.

The flesh. The cutting. Bertha. The trash. Hana desperately trying to perform surgery on herself before whatever is happening consumes her completely.

It works.

And for a few minutes Saccharine becomes the nasty little movie it has spent nearly two hours promising.

Then it appears to give Hana an out.

Grace is honored. The family seems more stable. Hana reconnects with Alanya. We get something close to a hopeful ending, which naturally means the movie is preparing to kick us in the teeth.

Hana and Alanya finally come back together, and the film returns to that connection between sexual hunger and actual hunger that it had been playing with earlier. They kiss.

Things become intimate.

Then the chewing starts.

Oh.

Right.

The movie wasn’t kidding.

The final reveal, with Hana having literally devoured the woman she desired, is nasty and effective because it takes a metaphor the film has been using for nearly two hours and finally refuses to leave it as a metaphor. The person Hana wanted sexually, emotionally and physically becomes something she consumes.

That ending worked for me more than I expected it to.

It also improved the Alanya material in retrospect. I still think the relationship could have been tighter, but now it has an actual destination. Desire, appetite, admiration and self-hatred have become so scrambled inside Hana that she can no longer tell one kind of hunger from another.

That’s a bleak place to leave her.

And a much better ending than simply defeating Bertha and learning to love yourself.

Saccharine sits in a strange place for me critically. I admire more of it than I love.

The photography works. The color works. Midori Francis works. Bertha works. The distorted-reflection idea is great. The movie understands exactly how disgusting binge eating can feel from inside the person doing it, and its transformation of modern diet obsession into supernatural horror is smart enough to justify the premise.

But it also runs long. It repeats itself. Some of the prosthetic work is distracting, and the film occasionally keeps explaining ideas after its images have already done the job.

Still, the last act gave me more than I initially thought I was going to get. The self-surgery is absurd but memorable. Giving Bertha back her name and history adds a little humanity the movie needed, and the final payoff with Alanya makes the relationship more integral to the movie than I originally gave it credit for.

From a straight filmmaking perspective, there’s a lot here I respect. As a horror movie, there’s enough here that I’d recommend it to the right audience.

It never quite becomes the great version of itself that occasionally seems within reach.

But that ending earns it another tenth.

6.1/10

Saccharine is now streaming on Shudder.