Sundance Review: SACCHARINE is a Messy Take on Diet Culture

There is no magic weight loss pill. Or is there? In the era of Ozempic and other weight loss drugs, there has been a resurgence in the conversation around thinness as the ultimate achievement.

Almost no one is immune to this constant noise, and the protagonist of Saccharine is no exception. Hana is a medical student at war with herself.

Struggling to lose weight while suffering from a binge-eating disorder, Hana swings from eating a box of donuts to furiously working out at the gym under the watchful eye of her crush, who is of course super-hot and super-fit.

When she discovers a weight loss pill that promises near instant results with no work, Hana is immediately intrigued. Who wouldn’t be? But when she finds out this magic pill is actually full of cremains, (that’s right, human ashes,) she sees an opportunity to use her access to the cadaver lab at her medical school to her advantage.

As if that isn’t weird enough, the ghost of the person whose ashes she’s consuming starts to haunt her. Will this deter her from obtaining her dream body and her crush all in one fell swoop? No, I’m afraid it won’t. 

While many pieces of media have asked how far someone would go to be thin/hot/perfect, Saccharine takes it places that are original and terrifying.

There are some truly disgusting visuals involving both food and dead bodies, sometimes interspersed with each other. While I really loved Hana and empathized with her motivation, the plot loses focus near the end, almost like there were too many places the story could go, and they tried to include all of them.

There are also some truly bad prosthetics. While Hana’s body changes quite rapidly throughout the film and therefore justifies some prosthetics and makeukp, I fail to understand why they chose to have Hana’s dad, a large man suffering with diabetes, played by a thin actor done up in a full fatsuit, a la The Whale.

I appreciate the commentary on the horrors of beauty culture today, specifically around weight loss and striving for perfection, but I don’t think the movie leaves you with any sort of takeaway besides, “don’t eat the ashes of a dead person.” Which, I dunno, feels like it should be a no-brainer, even if you don’t end up getting haunted. 

Here’s the description from the Sundance website:

Hana, a lovelorn medical student, becomes terrorized by a hungry ghost after taking part in an obscure weight loss craze: eating human ashes.

Natalie Erika James follows Relic (2020 Sundance Film Festival) with this revoltingly punchy, modern, and timely take on body horror. Through sickeningly syrupy scenes of literal and spiritual consumption, Midori Francis embodies Hana, a body-dysmorphic young woman bent on chasing her weight goal at all costs. The archetypal myth of the hungry ghost manifests literally, creating a uniquely tense atmosphere fit for a physically and metaphorically dangerous haunt.

The viscosity of James’ exploration of haunting and body horror in the era of accessible weight-loss medications is especially poignant, as Saccharine works to deconstruct weight and fatness as metrics by which we classify antagonism and personal shortcoming. What if the desperation to conform is a destructive consumption itself? What if we manifest our own bottomless specters?