“Saccharine,” the latest film from “Relic” director Natalie Erika James, is a deceptively brutal and unsparing experience. It’s a gruesome, tragic film about a woman who, in an attempt to quickly lose weight, begins consuming human ashes and discovers that a ghost is slowly beginning to haunt her. For every pound she sheds, she gains another pound of spiritual nightmares.
Even more frightening than that is the way the film is increasingly about the destruction we inflict on ourselves and others, and about how the world pushes us towards this self-destruction under the guise of self-improvement. A constant stream of social-media videos tell us we must be better, smiling as it bombards us day after day with how inadequate we are. But the steps people then take as they’re driven by a desire to be this elusive best version of ourselves can wreak havoc on one’s body and soul, just as few seem to notice the destruction playing out.
James sinks her teeth into this casually sinister state of affairs with a horror parable that’s more than a little all over the place. “Saccharine” often struggles to keep its eyes focused on its strengths, but ultimately the film is sharply menacing when it counts. Though the film, which was recently picked up by Shudder, operates in a similar vein to recent works like “The Substance” and “The Ugly Stepsister,” though it finds its own thematic ground in how it grapples with questions of desire.
Namely, James is interested in the desires of medical student Hana (Midori Francis). From the opening moments, the film brings food and sex into close alignment in a way that makes both feel like hellish nightmares rather than pleasures to be enjoyed. Hana struggles in her relationship to both, and absent anyone in her life that she can turn to for help, she is drawn in by the potential of taking a mysterious pill to lose weight. Maybe, she seems to think, she’ll then be able to be happy and get to enjoy other parts of her life.
Unfortunately for Hana, the pill she takes is actually a cursed one that is made up of human ashes. In one of several refreshing moments where James makes her protagonist a proactive and smart horror character (whose subsequent descent is only that much more tragic because of it), she discovers this truth for herself by studying the grey compound.
Instead of throwing the pills away and moving on, Hana takes matters into her own hands by acquiring ash from a cadaver the medical students are using for practice. She consumes it and begins to see results, though she doesn’t yet know the unseen cost of her decision.
She’ll soon find out when, in a series of effectively disquieting scenes, she catches a glimpse of a figure in her reflection. It doesn’t appear in every reflection, and nobody else can see it, but it seems to always be there — and James and her cinematographer Charlie Sarroff, do an excellent job of creating warped and eerie visuals that invite us to look deeper at what is looming over Hana’s shoulder.
Things eventually get louder and more explosive, but these quiet moments of stillness are the most terrifying. The constant presence serves as an effective expression of the agonies that Hana is carrying with her, just as it gets under our skin as spectators.
When “Saccharine” is confident enough to just let these sequences speak for themselves, it’s solid stuff. Whenever there is that persistent sense of dread that just won’t go away, you realize how out of her depth Hana is with this all.
Even when she does try to turn to people for help when her own body threatens to consume her from the inside, you realize how fundamentally alone she is in this. The core feeling of isolation rings true as it pushes Hana into more destruction.
Unfortunately, the film underlines and overexplains what is going on in a way that consistently lessens the impact of its visuals. James bites off more than she can chew at key points, bluntly exploring painful family dynamics that could’ve used the lighter and more subtle touch that was felt in the still outstanding “Relic.”
Still, the film’s flaws are mostly smoothed over in the moments where James wields a more focused thematic scalpel to cut through the skin and find something more unsettling and unexpected in the final stretch. “Saccharine” is not film that goes down easy, but you may just find yourself hungering to return for a second course to get a better sense of what James is serving up.
Saccharine is set to release in theaters in 2026.
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