TL;DR: A woman becomes obsessed with extreme weight loss and things spiral into body horror madness - it’s worth watching for the visuals, the uncomfortable atmosphere, and Midori Francis’ performance, but the story loses control of itself long before the ending.
A Horror Movie That Knows Exactly What It Wants to Poke At
Scrolling through endless fitness influencers, “wellness” advice, miracle diets, and people pretending celery juice changed their lives has basically become part of modern life now, so watching Saccharine feels more like somebody took Instagram culture, blended it with medical anxiety and body insecurity, then poured blood all over it, and this movie grabs the topic by the throat immediately and refuses to let go.
Every conversation about appearance, every shot of food, every little social interaction feels loaded with judgment, where even scenes where people are technically being “supportive” still come across like passive aggressive attacks wrapped in wellness language, and you will know the type - the people who say things like “I just want you to be healthy” right before mentally ruining your entire week.
The story itself does get a bit messy the longer it goes on, and I’ll get to that, but for a while the emotional side of it works pretty well, before it stumbles a bit.
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Midori Francis
Midori Francis, as Hana, absolutely saves this movie from collapsing under its own weirdness, where she has this vulnerability to her performance that keeps things moving, and you can see the exhaustion in her face constantly, like she’s trapped in her own brain 24/7 and can’t turn the noise off anymore.
And thank god the movie doesn’t turn her into some over-the-top horror stereotype either, because she still feels like an actual person throughout most of it, even while things become increasingly ridiculous around her.
The scenes where she interacts with other people are really strong, because they felt painfully familiar - the fake positivity, the awkward gym culture energy, the obsession with “better versions” of yourself, it all feels very real and very annoying, and the movie gets a lot of mileage out of how casually cruel people can be without even realizing it.
The Body Horror
The body horror in the film is handled well, but it isn't some gross out body horror you might be expecting, but we get various scenes involving food, body parts, surgery tools, chewing, slicing, blood, all shot in these aggressive close-ups, and the sound design deserves partial blame too, because every bite, squish, crunch, slurp, and wet tearing noise sounds amplified like somebody shoved a microphone directly inside a human body.
The body horror also actually connects to the themes instead of existing purely for shock value - excessive, sloppy, desperate, almost hostile - where even normal meals are filmed like a crime scene, with a sweaty, overfed, underfed contradiction running through it all.
And Then There’s the Ghost
This is where the movie started losing me a bit, as while at first, the supernatural element worked fine enough because it was also subtle enough to connect to Hana’s mental state, where I thought the film was heading toward something more psychological, but it slowly turned into “angry ghost throws things across room” territory, and the problem isn’t even that the ghost exists, because horror movies can get away with almost anything if the rules make sense emotionally, but Saccharine never fully figures out how all its ideas connect - the weight loss, the haunting, the body horror, addiction, guilt, shame, consumption - it’s all mashed together without enough clarity holding it together.
The movie clearly wants to say something deeper about self-destruction and body image, and parts of it genuinely succeed, but eventually it starts layering metaphor on top of metaphor until the story underneath gets buried alive.
A lot of scenes do repeat the same emotional beat over and over again - Hana spirals, somebody comments on appearance, disturbing imagery happens, rinse and repeat - and there are montages that overstay their welcome, conversations that don’t really add anything new, and entire stretches where the momentum just stalls.
Which is frustrating because visually the movie never becomes boring, and director Natalie Erika James clearly knows how to build atmosphere and create memorable images, even when the script starts stumbling, the movie still looks fantastic.
Even though the movie is fairly long, Saccharine still seems to hold back at times, which isn’t automatically bad, but it also means the movie sometimes gets stuck in this awkward middle ground where it’s too bizarre to feel grounded and not bold enough to fully embrace the madness.
But it does have its own identity I think, especially in how it handles shame and eating disorders - it's intimate, and emotionally raw at times, but it just doesn’t land every idea cleanly.
Final Thoughts
Saccharine got under my skin even when it frustrated me, because the performances are strong, the visuals are nasty and the themes hit hard because they’re rooted in things people deal with constantly now.
But the story lost focus the longer it went on.