Saccharine, which premiered Thursday at the Sundance Film Festival, has a provocative take on weight loss. Some of its depictions are more effective than others but overall it is a scary and poignant descent into obsession.
Hana (Midori Francis) is a medical student struggling between binge eating and working out. She lusts after gym rat Alanya (Madeleine Madden) who invites Hana to her training study.
When Hana reconnects with high school friend Melissa (Annie Shapero), Melissa shares her underground weight loss pills. She gives Hana two for free but the treatment costs $5000.
So Hana analyzes the compound and discovers it is human ash. Then she makes her own using leftover organs from her class cadavers.
The homemade pills have horrific side effects. The cadaver starts manifesting herself in Hana's waking life, escalating attacks no one else can see.
The manifestations are tied to Hana's blood sugar. So she has to keep eating to stave off the ghost like Jason Statham keeping his heart rate up in Crank.
It is a solid visual manifestation of the obsession for weight loss. People take unhealthy risks to achieve goals so Sacharine just makes it literal. Hana does participate in Alanya's study, but the effects of the pill alarm even the trainer.
Even creepier is the side effect of sleep eating because this actually does afflict far more people than cadaver ghosts. Hana wakes up with a mess and wrappers on the floor.
Real-life night eating tends not to be quite this extreme but it is still unsettling to wake up to wrappers for food you don't remember consuming.
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Throughout the various horrors, writer/director Natalie Erika James lingers on slow-motion shots of food, exercise and medical dissection. She still manages to find the beauty in gruesome displays up until the final shots of the film.
Still, Saccharine is a bit overlong when 90 min would make point. Hana and classmate Josie (Danielle Macdonald) investigate the cadaver's family but that doesn't lead as far as in other ghost stories.
Josie addresses Hana's disorder in clunky dialogue. She is correct that Hana won't magically feel better when the scale reaches a certain number, but the observation comes out of nowhere in the plot.
The film more effectively delves into Hana's family history that led to her eating disorder.
The horrors of our own bodies are a healthy subgenre of horror. Saccharine is still a worthy addition to the body horror canon.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
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