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(Sundance) SACCHARINE Turns Diet Culture into a Hungry Ghost Nightmare

By. Professor Horror 

Natalie Erika James's SACCHARINE, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival before arriving in US theaters on May 22, comes at a moment when conversations about bodies, weight loss, and self-optimization feel impossible to escape. In an era of Ozempic, GLP-1 injections, and a multi-billion-dollar weight-loss pharmaceutical industry, the film arrives with a question wrapped in visceral horror: how far will someone go to inhabit the body they think they deserve? The film opens with a slow-motion montage of nauseating contradictions, a woman gorging on jelly doughnuts intercut with a sleek, athletic figure exercising, and from those first frames you understand that what follows will be less a conventional ghost story than a horror film about hunger itself, the kind that no amount of eating (or not eating) can actually satisfy. James is trying to sit you inside the subjective experience of someone whose relationship to food and to her own body is total war, and she largely succeeds.

That gorger is Hana (Midori Francis), a first-year medical student whose complicated upbringing left her with a deeply disordered relationship to food and to her own body. She also has a crush on Alanya (Madeleine Madden), a fitness influencer and personal trainer at the university gym, but is too under-confident to act on it despite body-positive encouragement from her best friend Josie (Danielle Macdonald), who keeps reminding her that fat is a feminist issue. When Alanya recruits Hana into a twelve-week body transformation program as part of a research project, Hana agrees, officially as a subject, but really because she wants Alanya to want her back. Her medical studies, meanwhile, bring her face to face with a cadaver, an obese woman her classmates callously nickname Big Bertha, and the encounter is brief but haunting because Hana does not see a stranger on that table. She sees herself, or what she fears becoming, and the dread of dying inside a body she does not want begins to fester. Around the same time, she reconnects with a former classmate who has dramatically lost weight thanks to an underground pill called Grey. The friend hands Hana two pills to try, assuring her that is all she needs to start seeing results, and she is not wrong. Hana takes them and quickly begins noticing changes. The weight starts coming off almost immediately, so the pills begin looking less like some sketchy shortcut and more like a miracle. But once she cannot afford to buy more, she takes the remaining capsule back to the university lab to figure out what exactly she has been putting into her body and discovers the pill's secret ingredient is human ash. Yeah. We are officially entering "what in the absolute hell am I watching" territory.

Desperate for more, Hana discovers she can recreate the pills herself using the cremated remains of Big Bertha. So naturally she starts burning and capsulizing pieces of the cadaver. And this is where SACCHARINE starts doing its nastiest work. Hana is not just consuming food anymore. She is consuming a person. The boundaries between body and object, dead and living, nourishment and contamination start collapsing into one another. Every capsule feels like a tiny act of cannibalism by proxy. It taps into something deeply unpleasant because horror has always loved taking things that should remain separate and smashing them together until you start feeling weird in your own skin. But consuming Big Bertha does not simply change Hana physically. As she slowly begins swallowing more and more of the cremated remains, the dead woman starts showing up in her life. First in nightmares, then in waking moments, lurking in the corners of rooms and appearing in reflective surfaces. And James gets really smart with how she stages this. Big Bertha rarely appears in ordinary mirrors. Instead, she materializes in curved and distorted reflections, spoons, windows, metal surfaces, places where images become warped and stretched out. It is a small touch, but an effective one because the reflections themselves begin behaving like Hana's own relationship with her body. Mirrors are supposed to show reality back to us, but Hana does not really see reality anymore. She sees fear. She sees shame. She sees a distorted version of herself staring back at her. The more Hana consumes, the more invasive these appearances become.

Plenty of horror movies throw gore at the screen (which this film also has) and call it a day, but SACCHARINE goes after something much nastier because it turns ordinary acts into body horror. The film becomes obsessed with consumption itself. James repeatedly lingers on close-ups of mouths, chewing, tongues, saliva, and textures in ways that make eating feel strangely invasive. Hana does not simply eat in this film. She devours. The camera repeatedly watches her viciously tear into food with a kind of desperate urgency that becomes increasingly uncomfortable to watch. There is an aggression to it. Food stops feeling like comfort and starts feeling like a sickness. The close-ups become so intimate and exaggerated that they begin collapsing the boundary between eating and bodily violation. If you are planning on bringing popcorn or sneaking in snacks, you might want to rethink that decision because SACCHARINE is probably not the movie to eat through. James repeatedly places disgusting imagery directly alongside consumption, making eating itself feel queasy and unpleasant. The discomfort has less to do with blood and gore and more to do with making ordinary bodily acts suddenly feel wrong.

Like Obsession, SACCHARINE understands that the most dangerous desires are often the ones that feel ordinary at first.

 

What makes that discomfort more complicated is that James does not stop with food. The same visual language she uses around eating slowly starts attaching itself to bodies as well. The camera lingers. Textures become exaggerated. Excess begins to feel threatening. By the time Big Bertha's ghost starts appearing around Hana, the audience has already been conditioned to react with unease. The film almost creates a chain reaction where food becomes contamination, contamination becomes bodily excess, and bodily excess itself becomes horror. That is likely intentional because we are largely trapped inside Hana's disordered perspective, but horror images have a tendency to hang around once they get under your skin. They do not politely stay where they were placed. James becomes so effective at creating feelings of nausea, contamination, and abjection around consumption that those same feelings slowly begin attaching themselves to obese bodies as well. The film wants us to understand Hana's internalized fear and self-loathing, but there are moments where that fear begins spilling outward rather than staying contained within Hana herself. SACCHARINE occasionally reproduces Hana's disgust so effectively that it risks dragging the audience into it too. What begins as a critique of body anxiety and diet culture occasionally drifts dangerously close to making larger bodies themselves feel like the source of horror. I do not think that is James's intention, but there were moments where the film came uncomfortably close to feeling almost fatphobic in the way it frames bodies, even while trying to critique the systems that create those fears in the first place.

None of this completely derails SACCHARINE, and honestly that might be the film's biggest strength. Even when James stumbles, she stumbles while swinging for something much bigger than cheap body horror shocks. The film is at its strongest when it stops worrying about making neat points and simply lets viewers sit inside Hana's discomfort. Midori Francis does excellent work throughout, and James knows exactly how to create images that crawl around in your head (and stomach). SACCHARINE may occasionally get consumed in the very disgust it wants to critique, but there is still something deeply unsettling about a horror film that can make ordinary bodily experiences suddenly feel strange. Eating, swallowing, looking in mirrors, simply moving through your own body all begin feeling just a little wrong by the end.

I originally caught SACCHARINE as part of my Sundance Film Festival coverage, but the film comes to US theatres 22 May.

Looking for more horror where the body itself becomes the source of terror? Check out our review of  Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant.