SACCHARINE (2026)

Streaming on Shudder from IFC!
Directed/Written by Natalie Erika James.
Check out the
trailer here! !

Hana (Midori Francis) is a med student who always struggled with her weight. When she meets up with a friend from high school and notices her extreme weight loss, Hana asks what her secret is. Turns out the secret is in a dietary supplement that is yet to be available to the masses. Hana agrees to try the pill and notices immediate results.
After analyzing the pill’s ingredients, she finds that the secret ingredient in the pills is human ash. Impressed by the results, Hana throws caution to the wind and begins using ash from her medical cadaver at school. But the more weight she loses, the more out of
control her life becomes. Hana experiences blackouts and wakes up after gorging herself with any food near her. Hana has been possessed by a Hungry ghost, a supernatural being that intensifies one’s hunger while the host fades away and never gains a pound.

Where’s the downside you might say? Well, SACCHARINE proves that there’s a downside to every drug. Much like another weight loss gimmick horror film THINESTRA (which I am covering next), SACCHARINE shows that nothing comes without a price. The result is some intense body horror, which is a term that is tossed around a lot these days. In this film, the body horror comes from the natural, yet still disgusting urge we all must eat. Seeing Hana wake up from gorging herself is nauseating, as the film doesn’t pull away from showing every slop and chew she does during one of her spells. And yes, it’s nasty. The concept of ingesting human ash is quite gross as well. But who knows what really in those supplements we take in a dietary crisis? SACCHARINE answers grossly.

Much of SACCHARINE focuses on the fact that Hana is in search of companionship, and she believes her weight is getting in the way of that happiness. She drools over her gym instructor and wishes she had the confidence to make the move on her. It’s tossed out immediately that Hana is a lesbian, which is fine, but that’s basically the only trait we get to know about her until very late in the film. There is an underlying trauma going on with her family, but there is so much focused on Hana being gay in the beginning, that you just can’t fit that type of characterization in. Once the issues with her family surface, which is about forty-five minutes in, things start to make sense. But that family stuff, the real core of her issues, feels almost like an afterthought, because you know what? Turns out once Hana sheds the pounds she does get a little ooo-la-la with the gym instructor, which to me is kind of a mixed message here.

But while the themes are as strong as the familial issues, the real problem with SACCHARINE is that it tries to squoze in whole subplots about who the cadaver is she is stealing the asked from, legends of hungry ghosts, cancerous tumors, and a very implausible climax reminiscent of the final act of PROMETHEUS, where the protagonist must operate on herself. It just gets crowded in the end and wrapping it all up in a satisfying manner doesn’t really happen.

SACCHARINE does have an effective ending. It’s as if they had a wham-bang end in mind, just no idea how to get there. Or more accurately, couldn’t wrap everything up in the allotted time. And since this is almost a two-hour movie, I feel they had enough time to do it. Instead, most of the focus for the first hour is on Hana’s growing addiction to the supplements and her relationship with her trainer, which shows where the filmmaker’s real interest lays.

I’ll get into this in my THINESTRA review, but that’s film is everything SACCHARINE is but better and clearer. It’s a shame as SACCHARINE seems to be getting the spotlight with a Shudder release while THINESTRA is simply plopped onto Tubi. In the end, SACCHARINE is not a bad movie. Eventually it lets you know who the protagonist is past her sexual preferences and gets to the point the movie is trying to make. The film is just more complicated than it should be, which muddies the message in the end. Strong ending though.