Directed By Natalie Erika James

Starring – Midori Francis, Madeleine Madden, Danielle Macdonald

The Plot – Hana (Francis), a lovelorn medical student, becomes terrorized by a sinister force after taking part in an obscure weight loss craze: eating human ashes.

Rated R for disturbing content, grisly images, sexuality, drug use, graphic nudity and adult language.

Saccharine | Official Trailer | Independent Film Company & Shudder

POSITIVES

Between the heritage haunting highs of 2020’s Relic, and the drowsily dormant lows of 2024’s Apartment 7A, I was curious to see which side of Natalie Erika James’ unique direction that we were going to receive for her much-anticipated follow-up, Saccharine, and while the inconsistency of the results ultimately leave this film somewhere in the middle, I am thankful to say that this is a fitting return to form that flourishes Natalie’s fearlessness as a storyteller, even despite its glaringly evident imperfections that left my patience for investment casually tested throughout. For starters, like her feature length directorial debut, this is a very viscerally grotesque and invasively claustrophobic look at a universally vulnerable side of humanity, particularly one pertaining to the paranoias of image obsession, the difficulties of consistent weight loss, and the extremes of those modern dieting tactics that drive so many hopeless victims to disparaging heights. While the material dissected is full of very realistic stakes and unforeseen complexities that so many of James’ audience can relate to in the difficulties faced with remaining committed to a plan, the film serves as one giant allegorical exploit that fleshes out its themes and ideas through metaphorical manifestations, made all the more stomach-turning with the masterful techniques elicited by the production, that not only vividly immerses us in Hana’s everyday bleakly grim outlook towards attaining a thinner future, but also zeroes in on the feverishly ferociousness of eating impulsively, where Hana’s everyday limitless indulgence is articulated in the cohesive marriage of sight and sound flourishing a circumstantial heft meant to satisfy the supernatural possession taking shape of her body. While the deliberate proximity of Charlie Sarroff’s cinematography offers little resistance in the minimized void of documenting Hana’s uncontrollable pain and fear with a self-contained kind of traumatic turbulence towards depicted food that is presented intentionally disgusting, especially within the grittily grimy form of texture elicited to cast a spell of ominousness over the imagery, it’s truly the gripping heft of the movie’s introspective sound schemes that give its distinct brand of body horror the kind of haunted underlining needed to flesh out the vulnerability factor in the helplessness of the irreversible path of Hana’s destination, with everything from rhythmic whispers to famishing gulps devouring our desire to ever want to pick up a single piece of food for the foreseeable future. Because the documentation over these anxious actions are so unflattering and even voracious to even the strongest stomachs in the audience (Think Dennis Quaid’s eating scene in The Substance), it makes Hana’s devouring feel animalistic in the limitless degree of her three act transformation, allowing us to feel the pain and damage of every bite with articulated consequence, and while the film’s conflict deviates into more of a supernatural haunting antagonist, the longer it persists in its 107-minute runtime, the scenes that left me the most mesmerized were those isolated instances involving Hana’s counterproductive impulses, where nothing or no one she faces externally compares to the insatiable hunger internally that she has towards destroying herself. Speaking of Hana, the film is aided tremendously by Midori Francis’ constantly committed efforts, where over the course of the entirety of the film’s duration spent on camera, Francis delivers authenticity in the form of a physically conflicted girl without the strength or determination to excel in her goals healthily, without anything emotionally evaporative of Hana’s transformation making her feel like a completely different girl all together. What’s vital in this distinguishing is certainly the kind of palpable desperation in Hana’s slow descent into chaos, serving as the motivational means of obsessive insight towards pursuing something so transparently dangerous, but even in the midst of her seemingly overnight productive success, Francis supplants a complexly sympathetic and grounded portrayal that eventually earns confidence in her demeanor without feeling arrogant in her responses, allowing us to never lose sight of the tortured soul within, even against currents of so much physical change that threatens to compromise the identity that ample time during the opening act is spent vividly fleshing out. While this is undeniably Hana’s story and Midori’s showcase, it would be nothing without the varietal chemistry that she shares with every character of the ensemble, where each of them not only evoke something richly realized and thoroughly lived-in with the naturalistic kind of psychology that conveys extensive personal conflicts just out of our collective grasp of the script, but also the kind of versatility in interchangeably shifting dynamic that helps prescribe some much-needed levity for a screenplay with far too much repetition to its creatively constructed outline. On top of all of this, while the screenplay is admittedly underutilized in a majority of its supporting arcs, those pertaining purely to Hana’s risky journey refreshingly enact a show-over-tell kind of consistency to its conveyed exposition to the audience, particularly those involving Hana’s introspective feelings, which are illustrated subtly on a dietary journal containing thoughts that the script isn’t interested in wasting time towards fleshing out. In any other movie, these aspects would be articulated with either heavy-handed dialogue or unnecessary overhead narration spoon-feeding lazily to echo what was already experienced, but between this and James’ previous films, it’s clear that she abides by actions above audibility, and considering so much of the first half of this movie pertains solely to Hana’s quiet moments away from societal judgments, it requires unique ways of her to tap vividly into the thoughts of our centralized protagonist, with only momentary glances into the surrealness of what she’s experiencing.

NEGATIVES

The pleasantries stop there, however, as Saccharine attains only scattered shreds of its ambitious outlook for creativity, primarily as a result of a heavy-handed screenplay so on the nose and obvious that it wipes away any credible interpretive nuance to elevate the film’s impact beyond its overlong nearly two hour runtime. This is a movie whose idea of subtlety pertains to an overly obese woman appropriately named Bertha, or the unpleasant correlation between food and human cadavers looking interchangeably reflective with one another, and when you implement this forcefulness in a metaphorical framing, the storytelling attempts profoundness, but ultimately ends up with hilarity, where some of those vital moments pertaining to frights are compromised by unforeseen elements that on more than one occasion elicited a laugh of humiliation out of me, and considering nothing about James’ direction feels humiliatingly humorous or campily atmospheric in the slightest, it proves a lack of artistic grasp over the integrity of her material. In fact, once the film deviates from body horror to haunts, it doesn’t elevate the idea with anything beyond the aforementioned sounds that go bump in the night, and when you consider that James tied familial trauma to Relic, in ways that were not only universally relatable to the audience but also unavoidably terrifying, you start to comprehend how underutilized this supernatural antagonist makes his presence felt around Hana’s daily routine, especially considering the screenplay offers an easy out for our protagonist to constantly get rid of him. These lack of palpable frights throughout the film certainly makes the engagement feel undercooked, but it’s those character-building arcs surrounding Hana’s familial, friendship, and dating relationships that are most crucial towards comprehending their importance on the integrity of the film, and considering a romantic angle involving Hana and her trainer significantly affects the scope and stakes of the movie’s third act climax, the emotionality of its resolution falls completely flat as a result of the script undercooking the meaningful value of their spontaneous dynamic, with one such enacted action meant to surmise shock among the audience holding no gravitational pull towards making this feel believably earned in the slightest. Even when I did receive temporary excitement from James tapping into her bag of proven tricks, with regards to familial trauma, the script lacks the patience and commitment to flesh it out in ways that feel motivationally crucial to Hana’s indulgent feasting, with only momentary insight fleshed out about a broken home that fails to flesh out a vivid perspective, even as the film’s progress halts directly in its tracks to illustrate a jaded relationship between Hana and her morbidly obese father. Deviating away from the screenplay, even the production is held to a fault when it comes to distraction to the investment’s integrity, with the make-up and prosthetics department utilizing some chin and neck attachments to transform Hana into the overweight protagonist that she serves as during the opening act. The problem in this instance is that the prosthetics themselves don’t carve out a single shred of even temporary believability, even in an actress whom I’ve never experienced previously, and while her face might look slightly pudgy from the artificial additions, the rest of her body so obviously passes for petite beneath larger sized clothes meant to convey a bigger body beneath its layers, proving the lack of time and creative energy spent to overcome a limitation of budget that stands out intrusively in conveying the bigger picture.

OVERALL
Saccharine does project an image of enlightening commentary to its insatiably image-obsessed brand of body horror, but ultimately gluttonizes upon an assortment of excessive subplots and underutilized characters, the likes of which are undercooked and served to stomach-turning processing throughout a nearly two hour runtime that doesn’t always go down smoothly. While the film fails to capitalize upon the rousing success of Natalie Erika James’ dazzling directorial debut, the inescapably immersive exploiting of a top notch production fleshing out the voraciousness of devouring, as well as a ferociously feasting turn from Midori Francis, offers enough redeeming reprieve away from the gorging gluttony, proving James to still be of the most unique voices working today in horror.

My Grade: 6.3 or C