If you’re looking to curb your appetite and your GLP-1 supply is kaput, Saccharine (now on Shudder) may get the job done. Relic and Apartment 7A director Natalie Erika James helms this oogy gutchurner starring Midori Francis (Grey’s Anatomy, The Sex Lives of College Girls) as a med student whose eating disorder and desire to lose weight inspires her to — well, let’s just say she Goes To Extremes in an attempt to improve herself. There’s no doubt that this is a memorable horror outing, but whether you can tolerate its inveterate ickiness is the question.
SACCHARINE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: One of the first things we see here is a rather unappetizing closeup shot of donut gloop. Hana (Francis) is mid-binge, and the director rewinds and fast-forwards from chewing and swallowing donuts to un-chewing and reforming donuts in order to indelibly illustrate our protagonist’s bulimic tendencies. She understands that controlling her diet and exercising is key to shedding unwanted weight. She also routinely works out at the university gym, where she secretly crushes on a fitness instructor, Alanya (Madeleine Madden). So it’s for multiple reasons that Hana signs up for Alanya’s 12-week workout challenge: Losing a few pounds, gaining some confidence, and maybe catching Alanya’s eye.
Meanwhile, Hana is a med student who’s reached the autopsy stage of her anatomical studies. We watch with crinkled nose and brow as she and bestie Josie (Danielle Macdonald) pull back the sheet on the yellowing remains of an obese woman they crassly dub Big Bertha, and get to scalpelin’. Hana’s confidence in class doesn’t translate to her personal life; she’s withdrawn and timid, burdened with the low self-esteem rooted in her myriad issues, likely the product of an OCD mother (Showko Showfukutei) and a morbidly obese father (Robert Taylor). One night at the bar, Hana runs into an old friend who’s lost considerable weight in the years since they last saw each other. She gives Hana a supplement dubbed The Gray, which she says allows one to eat their heart out and still lose weight.
So down the hatch goes the pill. To acquire her own is prohibitively expensive, so Hana puts its contents under the microscope, and this is where the movie gets a bit repulsive: It’s human ash. You can see where this is going, no? Of course you can. Hana surreptitiously burgles from the autopsy-lab hazmat bin, cremates Big Bertha’s crusty, moldering sternum and synthesizes her own diet pills. And wouldn’t you know it, Hana starts losing weight hand over fist despite her propensity for wolfing down baked sweets until the sugary juices run down her chin. Alanya notices, too, the weight loss obscured by the exercise regime, for now at least. So are there any side effects to The Gray that one might read off in a humorously sped-up voice and fill up three-quarters of the run time of the TV commercial? If there weren’t, this wouldn’t be much of a horror movie: One may experience visions of the person you’re cannibalizing, and no, they’re not hallucinations, and yes, only you can see them, and yes, they can hurt you, and no, you should not taunt Happy Fun Ball. Which is to say, Big Bertha is coming to get her, and Hana ain’t sure how to make her chill TF out.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? I dunno, The Substance sure feels like the be-all-end-all of this subject matter, and Flux Gourmet is the grossest food-fixated movie in recent years, maybe until this one. Obsession depicted a similar deal-with-the-devil in pursuit of an out-of-reach crush. And toss in Requiem for a Dream if it was a more traditional Cronenberg-style body-horror outing.
Performance Worth Watching: James leans heavily on Francis to lead us through this disgusting journey, and she creates a nicely complex character whose extreme actions are an almost-convincingly logical extension of her troubled psychology.
Sex And Skin: A pretty hot scene in which something that isn’t food gets eaten.
Our Take: So, how’s your relationship with food these days? Healthy? Saccharine stirs up some compelling subtext about what that word, “healthy,” truly means in the modern world, whether it’s physical in terms of body weight and diet, or psychological in terms of self-image. The former takes precedence as the film gets gruesomely corporeal, whether it’s the sickeningly gloopy autopsy sequences or, perhaps even worse, the grotesque manner in which James depicts Hana’s eating binges. It’s all rather unpleasant in its tactility, giving horror mavens plenty of practical effects to ooh and ahh over as they’re slopping and glopping all over the set — and that’s just the cakes and pie filling.
James, who also penned the screenplay, diligently explores Hana as a character, filling in details that less thoughtful horror films ignore — e.g., interactions with her parents, the way she takes detailed med-student notes on her experiments with The Gray — and stirs in the scary/sickening stuff, finely balancing the substantive with the visceral. The filmmaker covers a lot of visual and thematic ground, maybe too much, as it flirts with jump scares and black comedy, tests our capacity for nastiness over the course of a nearly two-hour run time, and lands on a conclusion that’s more shock-and-blecch, intent on burning disturbing images into our brain, than following through with anything logical or sensible. Saccharine provides plenty of food for thought, no doubt, but the off-putting ugh-and-glurp of nausea unfortunately defines my experience of the film.
Our Call: Saccharine’s grossness is effective, but ultimately overshadows its lowercase-s substance. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
