★★★
Natalie Erika James’ haunted body horror about diet culture, desire and the terror of appetite is tense, thematically provocative and anchored by an extraordinary Midori Francis performance – even if it loses its grip in a meandering second half.
Saccharine arrives trailing the recent wave of feminist body horror, The Substance, The Ugly Stepsister, Raw, and mostly earns its place in that company. James’ third feature is tense, genuinely scary, and willing to push thematic buttons hard enough to draw blood. That it can’t sustain the pressure across 112 minutes is a problem – but not a fatal one.
James gives us a great hook: Hana (Midori Francis), a lovelorn medical student and compulsive binge-eater, joins an obscure weight-loss craze involving the consumption of mystery pills. Meanwhile, she’s also signed up to a 12 week weight-loss program run by Alanya (Madeleine Madden), a dream of thinness in figure-hugging athletic wear. James works the sapphic undertow with intelligence, the “do you want to be with her or do you want to be her?” question threading through Hana’s obsessions.
When Hana analyses the expensive pills, she finds they are human ash – and promptly creates her own batch from the ribcage of her hefty dissection practice corpse. One problem – the spirit of her cadaver is still hungry. Cue a number of well-engineered scares and jolts.
Sadly, the second half meanders and repeats somewhat, but eventually things pull back together. Several subplots circle around without fully justifying themselves and the central dread starts to thin. The film finds its ending; it just spins the wheels longer than it should.
More troubling is the relationship with fatness. This is ostensibly a film about body dysmorphia, and James shoots diet culture with genuine contempt. But Saccharine can’t resist deploying the terror of fat bodies for visceral effect. It works, which is precisely the problem. The film’s machinery and its message quietly pull against each other.
Nevertheless this is a film that succeeds where it needs to. The scares are strong, the fear feels genuinely earned rather than engineered, and Hana’s journey holds its grip even when the plotting around it sags.
James announced herself with the excellent Relic (2020), a dementia allegory that remains one of the best horror films of the decade. The forgettable Apartment 7A (2024) operated competently within its franchise obligations without recapturing that first film’s suffocating intimacy. Saccharine feels like a return to the territory that suits her best: small, personal, psychologically porous horror built around a woman whose grip on herself is failing.
Ultimately though, it’s Midori Francis who carries the film. For an internalised, hallucinatory horror built around one woman’s disintegrating relationship with her own body and desires, everything rests on her, and she delivers: charming, warm, funny and frightening, never less than fully present even when the film around her loses focus.
For all its contradictions, Saccharine stays with you. GLP-run!
Saccharine is in US cinemas now