Saccharine 2026 Movie Review
Saccharine is an oddball movie that explores body image and diet culture with an intriguing supernatural spin. It’s not the gooey gross-out horror we saw in The Substance, or the poignant body horror of The Ugly Stepsister, but it does have plenty of closeup shots of sloppy mouths chewing food, so there’s that. I can still hear my mom admonishing me for chewing with my mouth open.
This is the second film I’ve seen recently dealing with the theme of weight loss culture and body positivity. In Thinestra, a woman takes a mysterious diet pill and the fat she sheds becomes her doppelganger. In Saccharine, a woman also takes a diet pill that sheds fat, only this time a pill with a surprise ingredient that she makes herself.
Hana (Midori Francis) is a medical student and compulsive binge-eater who struggles with her body image, has a crush on her trainer at the gym, and concludes that the only way to garner her attention is to lose weight.
One day, she happens to meet a high school friend who tells her about a revolutionary new diet pill she’s been taking, and gives Hana a couple to try. Without knowing what they are, she hesitantly and skeptically takes one a few days later and immediately begins dramatically losing weight. In fact, she seems to be able to eat whatever she wants. She wants more, but unfortunately the mysterious pills are crazy expensive and she’s on a medical student budget.
But wait! She’s a scientist and has access to lab equipment, so she runs a series of tests on the remaining pill and discovers its secret ingredient: human ashes. Yep, all you need to do is consume human cremains and the pounds will melt away! Even more convenient: she and her classmates are in the part of their curriculum where they are dissecting cadavers. So Hana sneaks out a few small organs and body parts from an obese corpse they’ve dubbed “Big Bertha”, burns them up, collects the ashes, and surprise…she makes her own weight loss pills!
Naturally, this comes with unfortunate side effects, mainly being haunted by the spirit of Big Bertha. It’s interesting that she can only see the ghost in a reflection, but not just any reflection…one seen in a convex surface such as a spoon. It’s a subtle way of reinforcing the distortion of body image that can lead to eating disorders.
Some of the haunting scenes are scary and include a few jumpscares, the gross-out scenes are strong, and the special effects are solid, but for a large portion of the film it feels like there’s a lot of repetition. We get disgusting overeating scenes, nighttime sleep-eating, and a few good practical body horror effects. There’s plenty of time when the ghost appears, but turn around she’s not there. You get the drill.
With a nearly two hour runtime, I began to lose interest in the story. There were a few subplots that did nothing to move the story along. Hana’s mother is rail thin and has apparently been critical of Hana’s body her whole life. This is in contrast to her father who is morbidly obese, kind of reminiscent of Brendan Fraser in The Whale. I guess this was supposed to give us some insight into Hana’s internal conflicts, but mostly it felt like an unnecessary diversion from the main story; finding out where these pills were ultimately leading her.
It felt like the film had a hard time finding an ending, and when it finally did end, I didn’t feel particularly moved one way or another. Saccharine isn’t a bad film by any means, it just couldn’t sustain my interest.
