Like med student protagonist Hana (Midori Francis), a girl who struggles to lose weight, Natalie Erika James’s Saccharine makes promises it cannot keep. Its opening montage of close ups of Hana binge-eating — contrasted with the slim, toned gym bod of her gym trainer crush Alanya (Madeleine Madden) — establishes a link between the consumption of food and the aesthetics of the human form. The Australian oddity about ghosts, bulimia, and body dysmorphia further creates connections between food and flesh through its tale of a secret weight-loss pill with eerie origins, among several other ideas tossed in a blender. The result never quite coheres, and the film only pulls the trigger on its most obvious themes in its closing moments, leaving them without much set up. The result is a work that, while personal in its approach to self-image, attempts to conjure too many disparate concepts all at once, and gives few the requisite attention.
The plot, in broad strokes, sees Hana come across a once-voluptuous classmate after she undergoes significant weight loss, leading the self-conscious Japanese-American-Australian to experiment with a potentially-dangerous formula for a “miracle drug” that makes her suddenly drop the pounds. The issue, however, is that her desperation for this cure-all pill causes her to skirt medical ethics just to re-create it, which in turn leads to vivid hallucinations of a spirit that gradually engorges the more calories Hana burns. As a metaphor, it’s not altogether insubstantial, and her classmates even vocalize the movie’s central themes through their concerned (if clunky) dialogue about Hana trying to fix her self-loathing through weight loss alone. The movie’s enormous specter is, on one hand, a projection of insecurity.
On the other hand, this ghostly presence also takes the form of a large woman’s cadaver, who Hana works on in medical school, and whose more callous lab partner nicknames “Big Bertha.” Played by a dummy on the slab, and a heavily made-up actor as a ghost, Bertha is meant to draw revulsion from the characters and the audience alike. Although the film features dialogue eventually meant to humanize her, the camera’s gaze and the texture of her skin always seem to make her an object of disgust, which can’t help but work against the story’s self-love credo.
Bertha’s sudden apparitions are only in convex reflective surfaces (given their resemblance to… fat bodies?), and Hana figuring this out by noting it in her journal for the camera to see is just one of many little details that renders the whole concept either far too abstract, or far too literal. How do these things co-exist with no middle ground? For one thing, Bertha’s ghostly presence is, for the most part, so abstract and symbolic that it ceases to have any rooting in actual story mechanics; it’s metaphor-horror as metaphor alone, yielding no real scares or stakes until well into the movie’s 112-minute runtime. But the more Hana is distracted by Bertha’s presence, and the more she blacks out and engages in fits of binge eating, the more she uses her aforementioned notes to come to extremely logistical conclusions about how this all works, as though she were Cinema Sins-proofing her own haunting.
The film is rarely terrifying, or even mildly disturbing (it has all but one or two slightly spooky moments), and it’s certainly not exaggerated enough to feel satirical either. More importantly, it’s also never visceral enough to engender real disgust or concern. If anything, it’s puzzling in its approach, sometimes for unfortunate reasons. Right from the get-go, Saccharine comes up against the scheduling and financial constraints of independent filmmaking, in the form of the cheap, awkward “fat person” prosthetics in which the movie dresses the otherwise skinny Francis. This is perhaps unavoidable, as only a more expensive production might have been able to afford better practical effects, or been able to spend the time filming an actual weight loss over several months; instead, Hana is left looking less like a real person and more like a caricature with a comically enlarged jaw that often hinders Francis’ performance, making her look perpetually amused instead of concerned until the prosthetics mercifully come off.
This also happens to clash thematically with the ideas at the movie’s core — those of self-acceptance and the radical refusal to see fatness as ugly or a moral failing — which is by no means helped by the disgust with which the camera seems to linger on the food crumbs perpetually lining Hana’s mouth, or on Bertha’s naked corpse. One might assume the camera is, in these moments, attempting to embody Hana’s perspective on herself, but the film is never aesthetically sure-footed enough to really tether itself to a discernible point of view. That her curvy classmate Josie (Danielle Macdonald) carries herself with beauty and confidence isn’t something either Hana or the camera seem to notice, reject, or artistically accentuate, so there’s no real sense of psychological contrast between the characters either.
Other thematic specters loom over the film for extended periods, but are never quite woven into the premise. The magic pills could be a clunky metaphor for GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic (which only works if you have TMZ’s understanding of medicine), just as Hana’s history with food and weight are hinted at as vital elements to her upbringing (her fat-suited father lurks in the movie’s shadows, threatening to burst through the frame like a surprise Brendan Frasier in The Whale). But all of these enter and exit the movie’s purview with equal suddenness. Spackled across its runtime are gestures towards things that could lie at the heart of Hana’s visions — including stray, half-hearted mentions of “hungry ghosts” from Japanese Buddhism — but no concept ever seems to have made it past an initial draft.
There’s a real movie lurking somewhere within Saccharine, one that theoretically combines pulsing body horror with engaging mechanics that actually imbue the story with thrills and momentum. Unfortunately, the version that ends up on screen is too scattered to be scary, has too plain and dull a visual palette to create meaningful images, and is too haphazard in its musings on the human form to be intellectually rigorous, emotionally challenging, or even particularly entertaining. Things do end up getting fun in a sort of silly, self-aware way somewhere in the final act, but by that point, the film hasn’t purchased nearly enough goodwill to manage this tonal balance. The result, ironically, is a string of weightless symbols, and meaningless images that work against the movie’s well-meaning genre inquiry into how people — women in particular — are made to see themselves. [1.5/5]
Saccharine is currently playing as part of the Berlin International Film Festival. Visit the festival website for more information.
