My quick rating – 5.7/10. There’s that Shudder logo again, which means you’re either about to discover a hidden horror gem or spend the next two hours wondering how the pitch meeting ever got approved. Throw in the fact that Saccharine is an Australian horror film and the odds become even harder to predict.
The movie wastes little time establishing its themes. We get slow-motion shots of people stuffing their faces and exercising while Hana (Midori Francis), a medical student struggling with body image issues, gets introduced to a mysterious weight-loss study through Alanya (Madeleine Madden). Naturally, ominous music starts playing almost immediately because Hana is determined to lose weight for Alanya. To get in her pants, of course.
After reconnecting with Melissa (Annie Shapero) during a night out at a club, Hana takes one of these mystery diet pills and wakes up the next morning unsure of what happened. What she does know is that she’s losing weight, and quickly. Before long she’s obsessively tracking her progress and monitoring other people’s transformations online. Being a medical student, she also has the unfortunate advantage of being smart enough to investigate exactly what she’s putting into her body.
The answer is both disgusting and hilarious in a darkly twisted way. It turns out the weight-loss miracle involves consuming human ashes. More specifically, the ashes of Bertha, a cadaver Hana previously worked on during a medical procedure. So when Hana starts seeing Bertha’s ghost lurking in reflections, it’s hard not to laugh and think, “Well, yeah. You ground up part of her rib cage and swallowed it. That probably voids some sort of warranty.”
To the film’s credit, Saccharine comes up with some genuinely creepy imagery. The creature itself looks great, resembling something along the lines of Jabba the Hutt that is dragging around some unresolved trauma. Hana’s horrific dreams, perpetual hunger, sleep-eating, and increasing grotesqueness result in quite a number of memorable horror scenes. The practical body horror effects work especially well here, as well as a couple of jump scares.
The biggest weakness of Saccharine lies in the fact that it does not know how to clearly define its genre. There is horror, there is satire, there is social commentary, and even some dark humor mixed into one movie, but it does not always come together nicely. The discussion of the body image and diet culture in society is relevant and entertaining, however, some other plot lines seem to be unnecessary and uninteresting. The subplot involving Hana’s parents, for example, never contributes anything that I could tell.
At 112 minutes, the film also overstays its welcome. By the final act, I found my attention starting to drift as the story wandered through a few side roads that didn’t really lead anywhere.
However, Saccharine is not a bad movie in any sense. It has its own original plotline (sorta like The Substance, not nearly as good) some good body horror moments, and also has some disturbing images that will remain with you after the movie. It is just unfortunate that the plot was rather loose and unfocused. However, I gotta say the ending is rather memorable. It is dark, nasty, and outright evil.
