Review: ‘Saccharine’s’ Misguided Body Horror Eats Its Own Tail
The very first episode of Fleabag (one of this generation’s greatest works of art) features our lead, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, seated with her sister at a feminist lecture. The speaker asks the audience whether they’d trade five years of their lives for the perfect body. Only Fleabag and her sister raise their hands. It’s honest, even if it’s knowingly anti-feminist (and that’s kind of the point). Saccharine, the sophomore feature from Relic’s Natalie Erika James, is honest, too, though a bit unknowingly daft in how it chooses to render its dysmorphic body horror.
Midori Francis’ Hana is a medical student with a weight problem. It simply is, an unspoken insecurity Francis adroitly sells without ever having to speak it aloud. At the club one evening, an old friend stuns Hana with her dramatic weight loss, attributing the change to grey diet pills she’s been taking. Hana, ostensibly reluctant, takes one, and then another for the road. The next morning on the scale, she sees she’s already shed a few pounds. These grey pills are serious business.
Her medical know-how permits her to break the compound down (the pills retail for $5,000) in hopes of making her own. The key ingredient, unfortunately, is human ash. There’s little doubt in Hana’s mind. Immediately, she’s pilfering from a class cadaver cruelly nicknamed Big Bertha, scorching the remains, and ingesting Bertha’s ash. Worth it to have the hottest body in the lab (and maybe attract the attention of the hot young fitness instructor at her gym).
Saccharine is a bit of Insidious, a lot of The Substance. It’s an in-your-face, loud, kinetic interrogation of diet culture and the (yes) insidious hegemony that compels young women, especially, to jeopardize their health and wellbeing to look good naked. And it’s Insidious in other ways, too, namely in how Big Bertha manifests as an invisible specter who torments Hana, quelled only when Hana fulfills their dual appetites. Eating a dead person comes with risk.
Much was made of Coralie Fargeat’s Oscar-nominated sensation, namely, whether its overt sexualization of young bodies was the point or an unfortunate, misguided attempt at saying something profound. I fall into the former camp, and while similar criticisms will face Saccharine, James’ feature doesn’t have the deft touch of Fargeat’s film to inoculate itself against the inevitable criticism. As much as Saccharine endeavors to puncture weight-loss culture, it nonetheless presents larger bodies as spectacle and horror unto itself.
Saccharine, for instance, drapes not just one, but two of its key players in fat suits, an innately dehumanizing technique that’s endured far too long in the cinematic canon. While there’s an argument to be made for Hana’s introductory suit—she does, after all, undergo severe weight-loss, and I’m always more accepting of prosthetics than real bodily transformations—it still feels at odds with the film’s core ethos. It also looks, well… cheap. The jagged jaw lines, crevices, and folds are a caricature of fat bodies, and it’s incredulous that such an offensive prosthetic was used in a movie otherwise, allegedly, endeavoring to say something of note.
Worse still, Hana’s backstory is aggressively shallow, largely amounting to growing up with an obese father and a rail-thin mother. Fine on the surface, frustrating, and really just cruel when accounting for the prosthetic suit her father puts on to signal his own weight struggle.
At its core, Saccharine works against its humanitarian, progressive impulses. Not just in terms of its thesis, either, but also in terms of its horror. The body-horror elements, despite my misgivings, work to trigger revolt and disgust, whether it’s Hana deep-throating a slushie machine or removing a tumor from her pancreas. The supernatural shenanigans, however, are been-there, done-that, all the more confounding given James’ debut much more effectively reworked the tropes of the past. Even worse? The central antagonist (the literal one, not the societal one) is simply fat, and that’s contextually intended to be frightening on its own.
Horror is and should be confrontational, and even a little controversial. Saccharine certainly is, and it’s not entirely without merit. Diet culture and the quest for the perfect body (whatever that means) are inherently frightening pursuits, and Saccharine conveys that. I winced, covered my eyes, and yelped a time or two. Yet, despite the sheer talent involved, it’s a great idea whose excess is neither provocative nor funny enough to justify the whole. Fat bodies are not horror; yet, despite all the posturing to the contrary, Saccharine ultimately says just that.
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Saccharine
Summary
Saccharine’s earnest attempt at tackling diet culture via body horror manages a few shocks, but its misguided ethos are past their expiry.
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