Review: ‘Saccharine’ sinks its teeth into diet culture

You probably picked up on the use of fat suits and prosthetics in the trailer. Writer/director Natalie Erika James’ Saccharine plays on society’s disgust of fat bodies and its obsession with diet culture. The film endorses neither and tears down the latter, feeding the growing disdain of diet pills and extreme exercise. There’s never a moment that feels exploitative or gross. Instead, Saccharine focuses on one young woman’s self-worth, her psychological breakdown, and the emotional toll a society fixated on being skinny takes on women.

Hana (Midori Francis) struggles with her relationship to food. She’s a medical student and desperate to be loved. Her classmate Josie (Danielle Macdonald) rallies behind her, encouraging her to just be herself. But Hana wants more, always more. When she meets someone who claims to have the best weight-loss drug there is, Hana jumps at the chance without question. But she should have asked all the questions. Immediately, the powder makes the weight melt off her body. It’s a jarring transformation and signals that there’s something far more powerful at play.

Hana begins testing the powder in the school’s laboratory to figure out what exactly it is. She soon discovers that she’s been consuming human ashes. Somehow, the last traces of someone’s existence lead those seeking a new beginning to get their deepest desire. As is always the case, it comes with a heavy price. Hana starts seeing things—a slithery, lanky entity that’s come to take its pound of flesh. Francis brings immense nuance to Hana that’s quite refreshing to the body-image horror. The ethics around eating a dead person line the bottom of the film, making the audience confront the morals and the larger societal implications of doing so.

Natalie Erika James writes the characters with care, compassion, and complexity. Hana’s self-loathing and loneliness fuel her willingness to do literally whatever it takes to lose weight and become the person she believes she needs to be to find love. The scares bloom out of explicit societal biases against fat people, ingrained in all of us at a very young age. Hana has been browbeaten by magazines, digital spreads, and beauty influencers to think that her body isn’t worth attention, love, or celebration. James takes these very real horrors for women and places them within this paranormal story that serves to heighten the contempt for diet culture.

Saccharine joins Salt Along the Tongue (review) as among the year’s biggest horror surprises. Natalie Erika James tackles fatness that never feels tragic or depressing. Rather, she underscores the tragedy around society’s long-held tradition of fatshaming, diet culture, and ever-present misogyny within that scope. Regardless of where you sit on the film itself, Saccharine will certainly stir up plenty of necessary conversation.

Saccharine is out now in theaters.