Saccharine (2026)
Directed & Written by Natalie Erika James
Starring Midori Francis, Danielle Macdonald, Madeleine Madden, Showko Showfukutei, & Robert Taylor.

Horror

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

In Natalie Erika James’s Saccharine, Hana (Midori Francis) is a medical student obsessed with her weight and trying to find a way to lose it. She comes upon a new weight-loss craze in pill form and gives it a try, only to discover they’re actually made of human ash. That’s when Hana realises she’s being pursued by a ghostly entity who actually urges her to eat more, and more, and more. And so she tries to find a way to rid herself of the hungry ghost. Saccharine is an Ozempic-era body horror, though, sadly, this story could’ve been told anytime from the 1980s onward since the real takeoff of fitness and gym culture. James’s film addresses a cross-cultural obsession with weight/body image, specific pressures on women to be thin, as well as the obsession with thin bodies in the queer community. Saccharine uses a supernatural premise and yet it’s a very real story full of contemporary anxieties and bodily horrors.

Fatphobia is everywhere and Saccharine illustrates this in a number of ways. Even the dead aren’t immune from body shaming beyond the grave. When a cadaver is brought out for students to work on, someone quips: “We’ve got a hefty one.” Hana’s social feeds are dominated mostly by weight loss content, framing big bodies as inherently negative. Her mother is a big source of Hana’s weight-related shame, as she essentially spies on and monitors Hana to make sure her daughter’s not eating too much. Hana can’t even enjoy a proper birthday cake; it has to be a healthier option, not something sugary. “We don’t want to attract any hungry ghosts” becomes an ironic, terrifying line once Hana’s internalised fatphobia to the point of her drastic choice to use human ash as a weight-loss supplement. The only healthy presence in Hana’s life is her friend Josie (Danielle Macdonald) who urges her to rethink the sudden, drastic weight loss by questioning: “But do you really think you’re gonna magically feel better when you reach a certain number on the scale?”

The ghost stalking Hana can be read as the ever-present haunting Hana experiences due to fatphobia—an enormous, fat body that Hana worries she might become, that threatens to metaphorically consume her. Saccharine uses food-related symbolism to increase the theme of its haunting, too. Hana sees the ghost’s reflection in a spoon several times and also a pot lid; two items directly connected to eating. In a scene nearing the end of the film, the angry, hungry ghost lies on top of Hana, crushing her beneath its weight. This scene verges on becoming a ‘fear of fat bodies’ moment, yet, more cleverly, it can be read figuratively as a scene depicting the—pardon the pun—weight of Hana’s worries about body image/weight. The hungry ghost of folklore is often symbolic of people with an inner emptiness they attempt to fill with external things, whether food, alcohol, drugs, or something else. Eventually, Hana breaks the spell of the ghost by, among other things, coming to an understanding that she doesn’t need to fix her weight, she needs to fix her headspace: “Sometimes I feel like there’s a bottomless pit inside of me and everything just keeps getting sucked into it. And I thought if I changed myself then it’ll go away. But it just got worse.”

A subplot of Saccharine deals with how when we’re interested in someone romantically sometimes we can put extra pressure on ourselves to conform to their ideas about what’s attractive. Hana has a crush on Alanya (Madeleine Madden), who gets her to take part in a 12-week weight-loss program that she basically only does to impress Alanya. She gets a rush of dopamine after Alanya’s impressed with the weight loss Hana’s achieved and posts a picture on social media to commemorate Hana’s hard work. Josie puts a fine point on it when she asks Hana: “Have you figured out if you wanna be with her, or just be her?” On top of that, Alanya is actually queer, like Hana, and unfortunately within the 2LGBTQ+ community there are so many issues still surrounding weight and body image, only heightening the already existing pressure Hana feels to sculpt out a body that Alanya will deem acceptable and attractive.

Saccharine’s terror will be familiar to so many. Despite women having it much harder than anybody else when it comes to perceptions/expectations surrounding weight and body image, the terror the film evokes will resonate with people of any gender who’ve struggled with the scales. Hana’s experience is one a lot of people are going through today. We can read the human ash pills in parallel with Ozempic, a supposed miracle drug that helps with weight but typically hollows people out until they’re a ghostly shell of themselves. In today’s age of ultra-obsession with body image and narcissistic trends such as looksmaxing dominating social media, Saccharine channels all the anxieties and horrors sensible people go through in the face of a zeitgeist that sees fatness as a deadly sin.