Saccharine was inevitable. In the Western world, there’s never been a worse time to have a body. Navigating the Internet is an exercise in polarity in any capacity, but it’s especially thorny regarding the human form: swipe once for a well-intentioned TikTok on the myriad shapes the adult body can take, swipe again for a preternaturally symmetrical woman smizing in the Maldives, pause for an Ozempic ad, and finish your browsing with an AI-generated clip of Trump bench-pressing his adult sons. Body horror has leaked from Cronenberg’s hard drives into our daily American lives; the most surprising thing about Natalie Erika James’s Saccharine — presumably, our first GLP-1 ghost story — is that it took until now to materialize.
In Saccharine, Hana (Midori Francis) is a hard-working student who copes with the pressures of pre-med through a binge-eating disorder. Like anyone with a complicated relationship with sustenance, food noise is everywhere for Hana — the basket of fries pushed onto her by her classmates, the constant and unsolicited body evaluations from her mother (Showko Showfukutei), the box of donuts she douses with cleaner fluid to halt a binge. Hana tracks her weight and calories with the fastidious devotion of her medical studies. She’s also thinking of signing up for a weight loss study, motivated in no small part by the cute girl (Madeleine Madden) running the program.
Despite her best efforts, Hana can’t seem to reach her goal weight. So, when she runs into an old friend at the club — unrecognizable after her own transformative weight loss — Hana perks up at the mention of the drug that made it happen. The old friend gives her a sample, Hana pops the pill, and the pounds start to miraculously shed. But what exactly is this substance doing the job all of Hana’s hard work couldn’t? She takes a pill into a university lab to investigate, where she learns the drug’s macabre composition: human ashes. Hana is horrified, but hey, weight loss is tough. She’ll keep popping the pills, cannibalistic consequences be damned.
Saccharine’s premise shakes like the legs of a newborn calf, and it’s a domino that precipitates a series of increasingly baffling and unbelievable choices. When Hana commits to her pill regimen, she decides not to hit up her friend for more but to cook up a batch on her own. That new supply comes courtesy of “Bertha,” an obese cadaver donated to Hana’s university, one that Hana’s classmates spare no shortage of fat jokes toward as they pull apart her ribs and poke at her cancerous liver. After Hana boils down a healthy chunk of Bertha and loads her ashes into pill capsules, she starts noticing the odd spooky side effect. Fridge doors swing open on their own accord, chairs and bedframes sink and sag, protein bars glide spectrally across the kitchen floor. Then, in the convex reflection of a spoon, Hana sees it: she’s been haunted by Bertha’s ghost.
Natalie Erika James’s Zepbound morality play presumably has a message, but it’s difficult to tell exactly what it’s trying to say. Hana is the victim of a toxic and pervasive weight loss culture, one that preys especially upon young women that don’t fit the narrow window of Instagram virality. Bertha’s apparitions could generously be assumed to be a clunky metaphor for Hana’s shame, the Dorian Gray portrait to her rapidly slimming physique. But Bertha is so cartoonishly rendered — her lumbering lands somewhere between an undead Peter Griffin and the Resident Evil Merchant — that her presence and execution feel like a reinforcement of the cruelty Saccharine endeavors to rebuke. There are a few moments in which Saccharine nods to its own absurdity, all credit to an admirably game Midori Francis, but they’re futile consolation for the film’s confounding logic.
Saccharine drapes itself between two recent, zeitgeisty, and polarizing tentpoles of modern cinema. The first is Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, whose admittedly brittle feminism meets its feverish, post-everything aesthetics with astounding precision. The second is Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, a movie better remembered not for its brutal examinations of shame and addiction, but for its seesawing into absurdist caricature. Both films were bold and careless enough to inspire a litany of detractors; Saccharine takes the worst qualities from each without either’s bombast. James’ film runs almost entirely on ambition, as if the open market for a disordered eating ghost story were so creatively lucrative that the narrative and visual direction — the former a tangle of half ideas, the latter a limp simulacrum of modern horror — would simply fall into place.
The Whale also injected a new fixation on the ethics of fat suits into the discourse, conversations that seem to have passed Saccharine by. In fact, the movie has something of its own Whale: Hana’s father, played by Robert Taylor in prosthetics that make Brendan Fraser’s Charlie seem nuanced, shambles through the shadows of her childhood home, shooting insulin between meals and waiting to die. In one of the movie’s biggest gaffs, Hana confronts her father over the years between them robbed by his condition, the selfishness with which he’s accepted his life’s path. Her anger seems as if it’s coming from somewhere genuine, but clunky writing renders her speech another article of unintended cruelty.
The scene is a reliable sample for Saccharine’s inability to communicate itself. Its anger is due: for all our progressive performances, our collective ideals have only become more unattainable, our capacity to accept ourselves forced to compete with synapse-numbing blasts of hardly human forms and jumbled swings toward body positivity. We can and should be mad, but righteous anger can only go so far without clarity. For a movie bent on unearthing the toxicity of modern diet culture, Saccharine can be downright mean.
DIRECTOR: Natalie Erika James; CAST: ddd; DISTRIBUTOR: Independent Film Company/Shudder; IN THEATERS: May 22; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 53 min.
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