Saccharine

dir: Natalie Erika James

2026

Food itself is horrifying to some people.

I get it: so many people have eating disorders, I appreciate that and I’m not making light of it. People in my family, dear friends, so many people I know have been touched by the spectre of eating disorders that have impacted terribly upon their lives at some stages. Thankfully, most of them are still alive.

It’s an interesting place to start from for the premise of a horror flick, because in tandem with that is also society’s obsession with being thin as both a beauty ideal and a moral manifestation of what is “right” or good or proper. People who are thin are intelligent, disciplined, capable of self-restraint and delaying gratification, and are therefore good and reasonable people. Fat people lack moral fibre, can’t control themselves, and are therefore weak and bad people, under this logic. Our fear of varying, of not fitting in is universal, and we’re constantly being told what we should look like if we want people to think of us in particular ways, which is almost always unattainable for most of us, and how we’re worthless pieces of shit for not achieving that.

And all the endless scrolling on our phones doesn’t make a goddamn thing better, not for a second. So, eventually, that external ‘voice’ becomes an internal one.

Yes, this is a long-arse preamble – I can see that there’s a section of viewers, or a sub-section, for whom watching a person eat food enthusiastically would be inherently horrifying / disgusting.

I am not one of them. I was keenly aware of this as I watched the main character eating food with a bottomless, insatiable hunger, that I wasn’t the target audience. And yes this flick might be disturbing, but then I find a lot of romantic comedies disturbing too, mostly about how they still treat gender roles.

I never really found it scary, frightening, horrifying or other words a thesaurus would be happy to supply given how little it impacted me in that way, which is unusual for a horror film. But I was generally always interested in it, curious as to where it was going.

It’s still an interesting flick, is what I’m saying, even if it’s not particularly successful as a horror flick. Maybe I’m looking at it from the wrong genre perspective / lens. There are a heap of people, women, those identifying as women or non-binary, who would probably get a lot out of this flick who will never hear of it or ever see it because it’s a horror flick, and that’s a damn shame, I reckons.

Our main character is a young uni student, being Hana (Midori Francis). She’s highly intelligent, and highly focussed on getting her medical degree at what I assume is Melbourne Uni, because a lot of the uni establishing shots are at Melbourne Uni, though some are at La Trobe as well. That’s me filling in all sorts of blanks that may never have intended to be filled in, in that way. Because even though everyone’s Australian in this flick, and it was clearly shot in Melbourne, I don’t think it’s specifically set in Melbourne.

And when I say that I know it was shot in Melbourne, I’m going to sound like even more of a crazy person than usual, but I assure you, I recognise a lot of the places shot in this movie.

I don’t mean I recognise similar kinds of places, or that some shots look familiar: I mean they must have literally been filming in the alleyways, lanes and in front of buildings directly around where I work, which is in the middle of a bustling city, don’t you know?

But it is a bit disconcerting to see these places. When I use the word literally in this context, I am not using it in the way that most of us do, which is figuratively: I mean it’s buildings and laneways adjacent to where I work, when I bother to go into the city.

Woooo. Spooky! And the funniest thing is, because there’s a lot of day time shots I probably saw some of the filming happening around the building, and thought nothing of it, or thought it was just RMIT students doing their student-y films for some assignment.

Little did I know that it was a film that would tour the festival circuit internationally, and eventually be released in June of 2026! Maybe I’m even in it, as a homeless looking extra who doesn’t even know he’s shining bright like a diamond!

I watched and enjoyed Natalie Erika James’ previous horror flick, being Relic, which turned the awfulness of dementia into a poignant and potent intergenerational curse for three women, and James is certainly not resting on her laurels or sticking to the one theme. The lazy dismissal would be to say this treads the same path as stuff like The Substance, Shell or Ryan Murphy’s recent series The Beauty, but it’s really far more intelligent than that, especially the last two.

Unusually for one of these kinds of movies, the lead character is not only intelligent but has technical medical skills. All other versions of this kind of story have otherwise sensible people striking a devil’s bargain knowing that the source of their thinness / hotness is something terrible. In this flick, a former schoolmate introduces Hana to “The Grey”, a tablet with a grey powder inside, and of course Hana takes it and starts shedding pounds, but instead of getting addicted to it and then shelling out thousands for it, or having to open an OnlyFans account, she analyses the substance, or, should I say The Substance! In the lab at her university.

I’m not going to say it’s because she’s cheap, because that would be insulting. She is, however, financially cautious.

I hope this isn’t too much of a spoiler, but, you know, the substance is never something good. It’s always something bad, because these are always meant to be cautionary tales. These kinds of films, to be really unfair for a moment, always scream “you weak bitches and fatties would sell your kidneys and firstborns to be thought of as hot, because you’re vain shallow people, so let’s make you feel bad by getting someone onscreen to stand in for you, glow them up and then destroy them to make you feel like shit!”

Instead of finding out in a climactic moment way later on that she’s been ingesting meth / poison / lobster DNA, Hana finds out straight away what it is that she’s consuming, and then thinks “Great, I’ll make my own, thanks.” The kilos keep coming off, so why not?

Before she even set down this path we watched Hana doing a lot of binging. Lots of binging without purging. Once she starts taking “the grey”, her binging gets even worse, but, living the dream as she is, it doesn’t affect her weight at all. If anything, it’s making her lose more weight, just quicker.

Once Hana reaches what she thought was her ideal weight, and the actress can take off that latex double chin that was meant to make her look like, you know, regular people, she finds that her gorging is now involuntary, and she seems to have a hungry, angry ghost attached to her that never stops wanting more.

Okay, except for the g-g-g-ghost! angle, which I assure you is taken literally, not symbolically, this is perhaps more of a metaphor for our society and discourse and its obsession with GLP 1 receptor inhibitors trading under far more welcoming names like Ozempic or Wegovy or Fatty-Be-Gone! That last one would be a triumph of marketing, but I digress. We see so much promotion, so much influence from influencers for it, so much clickbait that you would have to appreciate that if we’re not on the stuff we’re fucking idiots, because come on, no-one can stand being fat. Any price to pay would be worth it.

The thing is, many of us had hangs up about our self-conscious and self-loathing approach to our own bodies and those of the people around us well before people started getting injections or pills that made them incontinent, and well before people started having fungal toxins injected into their facial muscles. This is just the latest iteration: the need to seize on something to make it look zeitgeist-y is almost dated and awkward.

The film knows this, which is why it links Hana’s behaviours and impulses not to the stuff itself, not to ghosts, but to her parents and their relationship to weight and food, and the impact that’s had on Hana.

Hana never really stood a chance, with one parent being obsessively thin, and the other compulsively huge (like, monstrously huge: The flick makes the handsome and suave Australian actor Robert Taylor, playing her father, look like he ate the character Brendan Fraser played in The Whale).

No chance, even with her intelligence and medical acumen. If there’s anything funny about this, it’s that once Hana accepts that the supernatural is happening to her, and why, she progresses in her approach by trying to apply the scientific method to her observations to find a solution.

The biggest problem is, her solution is a terrible, no-good, very bad one, but this is a horror film after all. And in horror films horrible things happen, and we see them in all their horrifying glory, but also people make horrible decisions, damning them and the people around them, sometimes.

This is mostly a one-hander, as in, our gaze is concentrated on Hana almost 90 per cent of the time, but there are other people around to marvel or gasp at everything she does. Danielle Macdonald, who isn’t a household name, but should be, is great as the concerned best friend, and while this isn’t a role as crucial as the one she played in the extraordinary If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, she ably assists our protagonist all the same. She just thinks our friend is on meth, but she still sticks around to help when she finds out it’s something not quite as bad, but not that much better.

Madeleine Madden plays a friendly IG influencer fitness instructor type but what she really is, is Hana’s prize for losing all that weight, because obviously you need to be initially rewarded when you lose weight, otherwise what’s the point. But she’s also there for a much sadder purpose, despite how supportive she tries to be.

I’ve lamented many times before that most flicks fuck their endings up, and that goes triply for horror flicks. I respect the decision the filmmaker makes in terms of Hana coming up with her bonkers solution to all of her problems (the worst, most implausible decision someone as smart as Hana would make), because after all the flick is about someone driven bonkers by her eating disorder. People living with a severe dysmorphic disorder suffer regardless of how smart they might be, or accomplished in other areas of their lives, that’s the point. So it is not outside of the realms of believability that Hana might delusionally believe that self-surgery is the way to go to ‘fix’ everything. The film does not reward her for thinking thus, so there’s that consolation.

And yet there still manages to be a cruel sting in the tail all the same, with the shocking ending emphasising something that would seem to contradict the self-harming narrative of people living with eating disorders: that they hurt themselves beyond whatever they might do to other people. Sure, plenty of mothers and fathers have instilled eating disorders in their children, and yet who pays the ultimate price? Innocent bystanders? Hot, Insta-worthy, First Nations bystanders?

Maybe that’s right?!? Maybe we only think we hurt ourselves when dysmorphia overwhelms our reason, in that we lash out and sometimes hurt / eat the one’s we love most instead?

As shocking as the ending is, leaving us to spend some unpleasant time wallowing in our own discomfort, I have to shout out those closing credits, because, wow, they were a lot. Perhaps inspired by the very inspired intro to the serial killer series Dexter, it manages to take harmless, everyday objects, like food, and make it all look alien, tortured and lethal. And somehow stress-inducing which no doubt was the intention.

It’s a bravura ending to something that ran off the rails a long while ago, but it’s not without its merits.

7 times hey Big Bertha, get out of my backyard, out of 100

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“Whatever shortcut you think you’ve found, it is a bad path” – shuddup, I’m getting results! - Saccharine