Saccharine review: freaky, fun body horror for the Ozempic era

This review contains discussion of disordered eating, fatphobia and body dysmorphia.

A great deal of cinema is about the vibe. Saccharine, Australian director Natalie Erika James’ deliberately icky follow-up to the remarkable Relic and her Rosemary’s Baby prequel, Apartment 7A, wastes no time in turning our stomachs.

A nifty opening credit sequence forces us to watch, in gory detail, as our protagonist Hana (Grey’s Anatomy star Midori Francis) gorges on a feast of sugary sweet doughnuts. Shot in reverse and slow motion by Relic and Smile 2 cinematographer Charlie Sarroff, it’s as confronting as watching a predator demolish its prey, blood and bone be damned, in a David Attenborough documentary.

We understand, innately, that Hana is consumed with both hunger and a visceral disgust for this need rumbling deep inside her. Within moments, she’s turfed the rest of the box of treats into the bin, dousing them in washing-up liquid like a penitent Miranda in a particularly memorable episode of Sex and the City.

Studying to be doctors, another ferocious pressure cooker of expectation, Hana and her bestie Josie (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actor Danielle Macdonald), are tasked with dissecting a medically obese cadaver they dub Bertha. That some of their fellow students are immaturely cruel feels all too bitterly real.

Letting off steam in a club after dark, Hana, who is clearly physically healthy but harbours deeply unhelpful internalised fat-phobia, is shocked when an unrecognised former high school buddy reveals she has lost a stack of weight on an expensive diet of non-regulated weight-loss pills dubbed The Grey. Desperate to get in on the racket but reluctant to part with her limited funds, she puts her smarts to nefarious use.

Eating the itch

Returning to the lab later, Hana tests one of the pills she has been donated. In a stroke of grotesque ingenuity, she discovers that its component parts are a near match for cremated human ash and pilfers Bertha’s extracted rib cage to create her own knock-off.

This being a body horror movie, the unquiet dead have a habit of hanging around when their earthly remains are wronged, as with the Japanese tradition of hungry ghosts, a connection drawn by the family’s home shrine, tended to so carefully by Hana’s fussily loving mother Kimie (Showko Showfukutei).

Soon enough, Bertha’s apparition causes all sorts of bumps in the night in Hana’s poky student accommodation, spectrally encouraging the student to binge eat.

Amping up the menace, James, who wrote Saccharine as well as directing it, works in a nifty twist: Bertha’s ever-growing presence can only be spied in reflective, concave surfaces, with a dessert spoon the ultimate spying glass, allowing for tense, keyhole-like glimpses of the aching apparition.

As the weight falls off Hana, in direct correlation with an undead Bertha’s growth spurt, she turns the frightening loss to her misguided favour. With the hots for personal trainer Alanya (Mystery Road star Madeleine Madden), Hana signs up for her 12-day weight-loss challenge. While there’s a spark between the pair, Alanya soon baulks at just how fast the kilograms drop off Hana.

A film of substance

An acerbic interrogation of the onerous body image demands that are thrust upon young women by social media and their merciless peers, Saccharine is equal parts about self-torturing disgust and empowered resistance.

A welcome presence is Macdonald’s emotionally intelligent Josie, who pushes back on Hana’s unwise fixations and speaks up loud and proud against the forces that would paint painfully thin as beautiful and the opposite as weakness or, worse, somehow monstrous. She has great chemistry with Francis, as does Madden.

If the monster literally being a fat person risks muddying the waters, James is switched on to that perception, detailing Bertha’s tragic backstory in such a way that we come to realise the real demon is the algorithm that feeds the beast, right down to a stupid TikTok-lie challenge where people judge their perfection on the basis of being able to insert their arm into a potato masher. Hana is, ultimately, her own worst enemy, despite Josie’s best efforts.

Embracing Sarroff’s stomach-churning Dutch angles, lensing a neon-hued, deliberately obscured Melbourne that feels alien, plus Hannah Peel’s burbling, gurgling score, James works up the artificially stylish feel of The Substance.

While the finale isn’t quite as gloriously bonkers as that Demi Moore vehicle, and an on-brand but overdone family backstory reveal is a bit too The Whale, Saccharine is a welcome addition to the body horror genre that gets at our overtly online doom.

Saccharine is in Australian cinemas from 9 July 2026.

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