Released: 4th June
Seen: 23rd August
There is a term that is slowly becoming a little more well-known thanks to the invention of Ozempic and similar GLP-1 weight loss drugs known as Food Noise. The idea of food noise is just that someone is constantly thinking about food, even after they’ve eaten a meal and should rationally no longer be hungry. A lot of overweight people (myself included) know this noise well, as it’s that constant thinking of what to eat next that can become debilitating at times and is a phenomenon that’s finally starting to be talked about. Of course, it’s also inevitable that it can be taken and turned into the subject of a movie and it seems like the film Saccharine has decided to play around with the horror of such an idea, but in doing so appears to have bitten off a little more than it can chew.
Saccharine follows Hana (Midori Francis), a medical student who has tried every weight loss method you could imagine and probably a few that would best be left undescribed but still can’t seem to lose those last few kilos. While out on a date, she learns about a miracle drug that helps the pounds just slide right off and so she gives it a try and low and behold it works, soon enough, she can eat almost anything and actually lose weight, which is genuinely amazing… until things start going too far. Not only does Hana notice that she’s losing an unhealthy amount of weight even when she eats enough to feed a small army, but it feels like there’s a strange presence following her that might just be the spirit of the cadaver whose ashes were part of the mystery medication she took and is the creature that’s slowly eating Hana from the inside.
Saccharine lives largely in the world of body horror, albeit with a little haunting thrown in for spice, and the body horror it plays around with is all too real. This isn’t a Cronenbergian body horror where the body is put through extreme absurd acts of violence, this is the horror of eating disorders turned up to an eleven. Anyone who has ever had an issue with eating will know all the horrors well, from the discomfort of eating more than you should and then throwing everything out in hopes of stopping that happening again to just the feeling like something is forcing you to eat all you can to make something stop. It’s turned into the stuff of nightmares thanks to the addition of a malevolent spirit that is following the main character around and throwing everything about at random, but there is a real kind of visceral, realistic horror at the core of this that can work at times, particularly if you’re someone who knows that feeling well enough for it to hit home.
For the early part of the film, Saccharine plays its horror close and carefully by blending those moments of eating with a disturbing soundtrack that includes sounds of lipsmacking or droning, giving the concept of food noise a more engaging form that helps the film work. It builds everything up nicely enough, showing the extent of Hana’s issues before the takes the pill and even how people around her have been trying to help her (anyone even slightly overweight who has gone to a gym will cringe with recognition at the early scenes of her interacting with a person working at the gym) and it feels like everything’s going to go well… and then the film starts going off the rails and never fully lands.
The pacing of Saccharine is where a lot of the problems lie, the two-hour runtime is padded to hell with moments that just do not work in the way they’re presented. Large chunks of the film feel redundant and don’t really scare as much as they just kind of exist. Some scenes just go on a little too long and repeat stuff we’ve already understood, while also making it easy to miss some important elements. It removes some of the power of the story and boy, this one needed as much of its heft as it could get to make the scares work, whenever it actually went for a new kind of scare.
Indeed, there are more than a few times when the big scary moment is just the physical appearance of a fat naked woman, and that trope is so old and tired it hasn’t been scary for decades. It’s not that Saccharine is just saying that being fat is bad, indeed it goes to great lengths to avoid saying that outright by having Hana’s friend Josie (Danielle Macdonald) also be a plus sized woman who is badass as all hell so the film doesn’t fully just lean into the idea of fat being scary… but every single scare for a solid chunk of the film is just this fat person moving about, it’s uncomfortable and not in a fun or interesting way. The magic pill makes you thin by having you be haunted by a giant naked fat person? It’s just kind of lazy and after a while it stops being as effective as it should be.
What helps Saccharine, indeed what makes it worth watching, is that Midori Francis creates a fascinating layered performance that just carries the film from start to finish. She manages to not only sell the mental strain that comes with those feelings of needing to lose weight but also the pure horror of her situation. It’s a genuinely great and completely committed performance that helps the film function at times. Sure, it drags at times and some things can be a little confusing, but the central performance is so good that it still works more often than it doesn’t, all because of this one performer just throwing the entire film on her shoulders and going for broke.
Saccharine has an interesting idea and does a lot with it, but it’s also just uncomfortable at times and there are parts of it that just don’t work anywhere near as well as they should. It’s a real mixed bag that some audiences might just not gel with because they live with this kind of thing in real life and the film never goes far enough to really scare (until the literal last shot, which feels so out of place compared to the entire film we’ve just seen, like an entire genre shift happened for the final 30 seconds). It’s certainly got a lot going for it, it could just stand to trim a little bit of the fat.
Movie Meister Reviews 