Saccharine is a unique Australian body horror movie perfect for the Ozempic Age
Saccharine is a film that firmly falls into what I like to call the “eating disorder horror” subgenre. Raw, Swallow, Titane … there are WAY more movies in the unofficial canon than you might initially think.
There are bound to be immediate comparisons to The Substance. And there are a lot of thematic similarities going on. Both films, at heart, are about insecure women who think their worth as human beings is inexorably connected to their body image (or, more accurately, how their bodies are perceived by others.) But director Natalie Erika James throws some curve balls at us, ultimately turning Saccharine into a bizarre supernatural thriller that’s anything but predictable.
Midori Francis plays the main character, Hana, a woman who’s utterly obsessed with getting down to 60 kilograms (that’s about 132 pounds for those of you shunning the metric system.) Since she’s a lesbian, though, she’s obviously not trying to lose weight to appeal to the much maligned “male gaze,” which is definitely one of the more intriguing elements of Saccharine. It’s not really a movie about societal pressures and unrealistic media standards as it is a film about singular compulsion … this irrational belief that all of your life’s problems will be solved and you’ll become the person you’re supposed to be just as soon as you hit a certain number on the bathroom scale. Yes, there’s a minor subplot in there about Hana trying to woo a thinner woman, but the movie makes it very clear that the character’s neurosis isn’t about appealing to possible romantic partners. The movie never makes it totally straight-forward, but it’s obvious that Hana has some sort of long-term complex stemming from her childhood and especially her absentee father. But to say anything more on the matter would totally spoil the movie for you, so I guess I’m just going to go mum on it for the rest of the article (until I don’t, anyway.)
You’re obviously waiting for the swerve to roll in and in Saccharine it takes the form of a literal cure-all pill called “Grey.” Hana meets a woman who tells her the mysterious, unregulated supplement let her shed a tremendous amount of weight in a very short period of time, so take a wild guess what Hana does when she’s offered a free pill. And no, that’s not a spoiler, because if she didn’t take it we literally wouldn’t have a movie.
Now, there’s obviously some parallels going on here with the ongoing GLP-1 craze. Clearly, this movie wouldn’t have had the same kind of subtext just ten years ago, when the idea of Ozempic was still the stuff of sci-fi fantasy. And that puts James in a weird position as a filmmaker and storyteller — intentionally or not, Saccharine kinda comes off as an anti-Ozempic movie, which I’m sure is going to rankle some viewers as an anti-science statement by default. It’s not really a movie about diet culture any more, even if that was the director’s intent. Instead, it becomes a direct portrait of clinical anorexia, where the fixation on losing weight takes precedence over everything else in an individual’s life. In that regard, Saccharine is one of the better and more accurate depictions of anorexia in modern film, even if the word isn’t mentioned once during the movie. Watching Hana continually lower her “target weight” and exhaustively chart out her exercise routines and fanatically weigh herself on a scale over and over again definitely tells the real story undergirding Saccharine.
I guess I should’ve mentioned this earlier, but Hana is a medical student whose current assignment is dissecting the corpse of a morbidly obese woman. There is a great scene where Hana sees the corpse’s nail polish color and how it eerily matches her own — so she goes home and removes it, just because. It’s the small touches like that which make Saccharine work; it’s a depiction of a rational person gripped in the clutches of irrationality.
Of course, this being a horror movie, there has to be some kind of catch with that miracle supplement. I don’t think it’s necessarily a spoiler to give away the pill’s secret ingredient — indeed, the marketing materials for the movie itself gives it away — but it definitely ties into Hana’s work as a student. Which slowly leads to the major plot twist of the movie, which is sure to divide audiences. There’s really no way to even tiptoe into it without spoiling the entire movie for you, so again … I’ll keep my trap shut and let you figure it out for yourself.
The ensemble cast is pretty good. Danielle Macdonald plays Hana’s bestie while Madeline Madden plays Hana’s object of affection. Showko Showfukutei plays Hana’s mom and Robert Taylor plays her dad. Which brings me to the biggest problem I had with the movie as a viewer.
Again, mild spoiler territory ahead. For a movie that pats itself on the back for promoting body positivity and eschewing traditional beauty standards, the fact that Taylor’s character is a morbidly obese ghoul in obvious prosthetics kinda feels self-defeating, if not a little hypocritical. Furthermore — and now we’re getting into MAJOR spoilers, kids — the main villain of the movie, the thing that threatens the life of our heroine, takes the force of a morbidly obese ghost. No matter how you slice it as a psychodrama, the movie still makes morbid obesity look ghastly, monstrous, inhuman and something to be avoided at all costs. I’m not going to go as far as to say that Saccharine is a fat-shaming movie, but it’s certainly not a fat-celebrating movie, either. Make of that, what you will.
Oddly enough, the movie Saccharine reminded me of the most was a somewhat obscure South Korean animated film called Beauty Water from 2020. It’s pretty much the same central premise of Saccharine, albeit with some obvious cultural differences. It makes for a great double feature, especially if you’re looking for how two filmmakers can approach almost identical source material in two totally different ways.
Saccharine is a movie with a strong first act, a solid second act and a third act that largely goes off the rails. The pacing is a little inconsistent and some scenes drag on for far too long. At nearly two hours, it’s probably 20 minutes too long for its own good. But the final result is an engrossing movie, albeit one with some iffy aspects. It’s not for all tastes, but if you’re into slow burn, character-driven, neurotic psychological horror, it might be right up your alley.
GIVE IT A WATCH IF YOU LIKE: Ti West movies, Oddity, that one episode of Tales From The Darkside with the sentient vegetables in it
DIRECTOR: Natalie Erika James
STARRING: Midori Francis, Danielle Macdonald, Showko Showfukutei, Robert Taylor
STUDIO: Stan / Thrum / Carver Films
DISTRIBUTOR: Maslow Entertainment / Shudder
LANGUAGE: English
RUNTIME: 113 minutes
RELEASE DATE: May 22, 2026
