Review: ‘Saccharine’s’ Misguided Body Horror Eats Its Own Tail
‘Saccharine’s’ earnest attempt at tackling diet culture via body horror manages a few shocks, but its misguided ethos are past their expiry.
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.
