Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Natalie Erika James.
Frayed parent child relationships! Academic imposter syndrome! Sexually identity uncertainly! Failed expectations! Body image regrets! It’s a trauma smorgasbord.
While many modern films bank on a single instance of trauma, or on occasion, two flavors of trauma, Saccharine opts for a food trauma dish piled high. One of the latest films from Shudder follows a young medical student, Hana (Midori Francis), facing all these issues on top of the heady nature of autopsies and plowing through arcane medical text books.
Cast of Saccharine
- Midori Francis as Hana
- Danielle Macdonald as Josie
- Madeleine Madden as Alanya
- Robert Taylor as Travis
- Showko Showfukutei as Kimie
- Annie Shapero as Melissa
Hana is deep into her medical studies, but she’s distracted by a nagging body dysmorphia leaving her with the feeling that she’s overweight. She obsessively tries everything to contend with her weight issues including journaling, exercise boot camps, and continuously throwing her food away. Academic or otherwise, nothing seems to work.
As Hana seemingly begins to give up on her ever-present battle with the scale, she has a chance encounter one night blowing off the proverbial steam with her medical student cohorts. When approached Hana doesn’t recognize the person that initially makes contact with her. After some pleasantries Hana quickly realizes that the stunning woman before her was one of her “fat” friends in high school.
Curious about this transformation, Hana inquires with her now remarkable school chum who discloses that the answer to weigh loss all lies in a simple pill that contains a grey power, AKA grey. Her friend gives Hana a pill that night, and then proceeds to slide her one more for the road.
Being the burgeoning medical student Hana decides to reverse engineer the contents of the pill to determine the exact origins of this miracle weight loss pill. To her somewhat underwhelming surprise, the grey matter in the pill is actually the ashy remains of…HUMANS.
Weirdly undeterred, Hana and her medical school cohorts continue with their dissection of their wildly obese corpse. Hana’s mind is solely focused on weight loss and she experiences a medical gestalt. If the pills are derived from dead humans, and she’s currently dissecting dead humans, then why not make the pills herself!
For the better part of an hour and half writer and director Natalie Erika James takes the audience on a cautionary weight loss journey with Hana as she’s frighteningly pursued by the ghost of the woman that she’s been dissecting and injecting.
Hana has no room for this ghostly apparition in her life. She’s still contending with her studies, a budding romance with her gym instructor, and a rather peculiar relationship with her mother and father. The ghost however has other ideas for Hana.
In another stroke of scientific genius Hana determines the spiritual connection between herself and the cadaver that she’s been eating for a better part of a month. Does the solution work? Does Hana stay slim? Will she walk off into the sunset with her gym instructor? Don’t worry. All these things get answers in a wonderful punch-line of an ending.
Should you see Saccharine?
Save for the previously mentioned unnecessarily long run time, Saccharine is a riveting character study of the competing traumas that people are faced with in the 21st century. It’s no longer enough to be in medical school, or have a great group of friends, or be the smartest person in the room. Now you’re required to manufacture all these things on a daily basis.
Hana is the perfect foil for this GenZ malaise. She’s confident and smart, but simultaneously insecure and uncertain. It makes sense that she’d dive into the weight loss deep and look for the simple fix to her disquieting fears.
Saccharine does exceptionally well with the characters, the script, and cinematography. However, again, with an overly long look at Hana’s slow descent into madness, coupled with relatively few scares, make this a run of the mill affair.
If you’re able to make it through half of the film, be sure to stick around until the end. It’s both a doozy, and interestingly, has the distinct possibility of churning out a sequel.
Saccharine is Rated R and currently streaming on Shudder.