Doing a horror movie based on body dysmorphia and body image is going to be a hot topic, especially after the huge success of The Substance. However, Natalie Erika James tackles this in a new way with Saccharine to some rather mixed results, unfortunately. It is effective and carries some weight, but there is just something inherently missing. You want it to go faster and not coast at just under the speed limit on the highway. Saccharine tells you rather quickly what it’s going to be, and what’s going to happen, and it works, but it never swerves, never accelerates, never has you fearing for your life, so it plays well – just wanted it to go deeper and more uneasy.
Saccharine
- Director: Natalie Erika James
- Starring: Midori Francis, Danielle Macdonald, Madeleine Madden, Joseph Baldwin, Robert Taylor, Emily Milledge, Lisa Crittenden, Lucy Goleby
- Genre: Horror
- Runtime: 112 mins
- User Rating: ★ 6
Saccharine focuses on Hana (Midori Francis), who is a medical student who runs into an old friend who has experienced a significant weight loss and looks incredible. Slightly taken aback and unable to hide her expression, the friend asks if she wants to know what she took and gives her the pills she was using. She’s also surrounded by her voice of reason in her best friend Josie (Danielle Macdonald), who’s incredibly comfortable in her own skin, and the gym trainer she talks to Alanya (Madeline Badden). However, Josie and Hana are working with a cadaver nicknamed Big Bertha, which becomes a horrifying character in its own right throughout the feature.
Hana, against Josie’s advice and probably Hana’s own better judgment, takes the pills given to her and they work better than anything Hana has ever tried on her own. She is enthused and enthralled by this seemingly magic drug (like Ozempic but a pill, commentary or coincidence here?) The pills are also rather expensive, so she tries to reverse engineer the pills so she can make them herself for less of a financial burden, but discovers they are made of human ash.
What happens next is something truly unsettling ad disturbing, and while we won’t spoil the consequences, knowing James’ other work certainly would help to know what comes next. Hana makes her own pills using the ash of Big Bertha, and there are some dire consequences to say the least, which provides an out-of-body experience that is going to entice audiences, but needs to be more fleshed out and grounded to make it something truly for us to be hooked into.
While James’ direction is top-notch, the script feels like it was a whiteboard pitch where things were thrown together and saw what stuck, and what stuck is great, there just isn’t a clear path to get there. There is a lot of disjointedness that happens, but the overall ideas and themes present in Saccharine are great, and thankfully, Midori Francis is a very bright light in a dark, twisted movie. Her performance is simply sublime and carries a lot of the weight of the movie and certainly makes for a more compelling feature that would’ve landed better with a tighter script, but the brilliance of Francis’ performance more than makes up for any shortcomings.
