Synopsis: Â A lovelorn medical student becomes terrorized by a sinister force after taking part in an obscure weight loss craze: eating human ashes.
Stars: Midori Francis, Danielle Macdonald, Madeleine Madden, Robert Taylor
Director: Natalie Erika James
Rated: R
Running Length: 113 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Saccharine serves up a wildly bold premise and a committed lead turn from Midori Francis, but the prosthetic work and supernatural machinery never quite match the gut-punch of its real-world horror.
Saccharine Review: You Are What You Eat (Allegedly)
Eating disorders are having a strange cultural moment. Between Ozempic chatter at every brunch table, AI-filtered bodies dominating every scroll, and the endless rebrand of disordered behavior as “wellness,” it feels like the topic is everywhere and nowhere at once. Into that conversation walks Saccharine, the third feature from Natalie Erika James (Relic, Apartment 7A), which asks a question nobody else seems to be asking out loud: what if the latest miracle pill was, you know, people? Specifically their ashes? It’s a premise so audacious you almost have to admire the swing, even when the follow-through stumbles.
The Pitch (and the Pill)
Hana (Midori Francis, Unseen) is a Japanese-Australian medical student stuck in the brutal loop anyone with a complicated relationship to food will recognize on sight. Binge. Regret. Restart the journal. Repeat. When she runs into a high school friend who’s dropped a noticeable amount of weight, she gets tipped off to an underground capsule that’s expensive, effective, and, on inspection, made of human cremains. Inconvenient. Lucky for Hana, her anatomy lab is currently working on a generously proportioned cadaver the students have crudely nicknamed Big Bertha. The shortcut writes itself. So does the haunting that follows.
Francis Carries the Weight (and the Wig)
Francis is genuinely terrific here, doing the kind of internal work that doesn’t need a lot of help. She makes the loneliness legible before Hana ever picks up the pill, and she keeps that emotional through-line steady even as her physical reality shrinks down.
Which is why I kept wishing the film trusted her more. The prosthetic stages meant to track Hana’s transformation pulled me out more than they pulled me in, landing closer to ’90s fat-suit territory than to the seamless body horror James clearly wanted. There’s a Goldie-Hawn-eating-frosting-in-Death Becomes Her energy to a few early scenes that I’m not sure was intentional.
Hana’s slow-burn crush on Alanya (Madeleine Madden) adds a tender, queer layer that gives the movie a unique heartbeat. Madden has the right tension with Francis, and when the romance is allowed to breathe, it works. The problem is the romantic B-story starts eating into the mystery instead of feeding it. That’s a writing issue, not a casting one. Robert Taylor and Showko Showfukutei do nice work as Hana’s parents, sketching out a family dynamic where food and control have already been entangled for a generation.
And then there’s Josie. Look, I love Danielle Macdonald (Falling for Figaro). I’m just not sure when she officially graduated to the “best friend in a wig” tier, because the hair situation here suggests she’s about to lead a 1984 miners’ strike in Glasgow. Macdonald gets reduced to moral-compass duty, which feels like a misuse of her leading-lady talent.
Style Over Spook
Saccharine hits the sweet spot on the technical side of things. Cinematographer Charlie Sarroff (Smile 2) keeps the camera direct and the jolts crisp. There’s a clever rule built in that ghosts only appear in reflective surfaces, and editor Sean Lahiff (Together) milks that beautifully. Hannah Peel’s score does that thing where you don’t notice it until you can’t shake it. The medical school sequences could’ve leaned hard into gore-show territory but James keeps the focus on Hana’s living torment, not the bodies on the slab. Production designer Josephine Wagstaff makes Hana’s apartment feel as cramped as her headspace.
Where the Sugar Goes Sour
The supernatural mechanics are the least interesting part of Saccharine, which is a strange thing to say about a horror movie. The ghost stuff lands best when James leans into the cultural texture around it. There’s a brilliant throwaway moment where Hana’s mom, a control freak who keeps a kitchen camera trained on her housebound husband, asks Hana to refresh the offerings at the family altar so they don’t draw in any hungry ghosts. That single line tells you more about what the film is really doing than any of the louder scares around it.
The hungry ghost is the whole movie. It’s the dad locked out of his own fridge. It’s Hana opening the freezer at 2 a.m. It’s every craving that can’t be filled by the thing it’s pointed at. When the spooks tap that vein, Saccharine hums. When they don’t, they feel like a separate movie playing on a screen next door. The ending makes some choices I’m still puzzling over a few days later, but the level of pure discomfort James generates is worth showing up for, and Francis’s performance is the kind that lingers. Sometimes the scariest thing on screen is just a mirror.
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