Saccharine is a body horror film for the Ozempic era

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ)

The Australian supernatural body horror film Saccharine is truly horror for the Ozempic era – a time when emaciation is praised, inclusive messages about body positivity have been silenced, and weight loss is framed as virtuous, no matter the physical or psychological cost.

It is an effective exploration of one woman’s eating disorder, and a worthy entry into the growing canon of contemporary female-led horror. It also highlights some of the challenges in using the horror genre to ask difficult questions about cultural anxieties.

Hana (Midori Francis) is a Japanese-Australian medical student who struggles with poor body image and a compulsive eating disorder. She feels trapped between the pressures of study, the expectations of her overbearing mother, social media “wellness” challenges, the body positive attitudes of her friends, and her attraction to her hot and skinny new gym instructor Alanya (Madeleine Madden).

An old school friend introduces Hana to a new weight loss craze – an expensive supplement nicknamed “grey”, made from cremated human remains. Hana goes to desperate lengths to create her own pills. She steals and incinerates parts of a cadaver she is dissecting in anatomy class, a fat woman called Grace dubbed “Big Bertha” by an insensitive classmate.

After starting the pills, Hana finds herself haunted by the cadaver’s ghost (Anna Adams) – quite the unwanted side effect. Hana shrinks rapidly, but remains ravenously hungry.

The more she eats, the more weight she loses, and the bigger and more aggressive ghostly Bertha gets.

Sometimes sensual, sometimes revolting

Francis gives an engaging and vulnerable performance, exploring Hana’s struggles with care. It is a very physical role, and hard to watch as Hana gets thinner, backsliding into her disordered eating again and again, finding equal parts pleasure and terror in her compulsions.

As in her earlier feature films Relic (2020) and Apartment 7A (2024), writer-director Natalie Erika James excels at probing complex female relationships and unstable mental states.

The film’s stylish design also contributes to Hana’s heightened sense of anxiety. Production design and cinematography emphasise candy-coloured pinks and greens, lending the world a stylised sense of twee femininity, not unlike New Zealand body horror Grafted (2024), which also interrogates beauty norms, or the satirical thriller Promising Young Woman (2022). Hannah Peel’s evocative soundscape combines electronic scoring with gasps and pants moving between anxiety and desire.

Some sequences involving food, including the terrific closing credits, also combine beauty, disgust and excess in compelling ways. There has not been so much binge eating in a horror film since the infamous pie eating scene in A Ghost Story (2017).

Saccharine is sometimes sensual, sometimes revolting, and sometimes both at the same time.

Society’s ‘hungry ghost’

Horror can be an ambivalent genre. It is highly effective at addressing cultural fears and anxieties, sometimes directly, and frequently through metaphor. At the same time, its imagery can also reinforce fears and negative stereotypes in a reactionary manner.

Because of this, Saccharine will be divisive in its treatment of body image, especially fatness and fatphobia.

Even though she knows better, as a doctor in training, Hana’s sense of self is tangled up with competing messages about her weight. Some of the film’s characters reiterate that one’s dignity and worth aren’t related to body size; this appears to be the film’s take-home message.

Hana is also bombarded with cultural narratives and inherited beliefs conflating thinness with self-control, self-care, attractiveness and wellbeing; and fat with moral weakness.

It’s clear the corpulent “hungry ghost” haunting Hana is a powerful metaphorical expression of her eating disorder that also makes wider social attitudes visible.

At the same time, the film frames fat bodies in ways explicitly designed to evoke fear and disgust in the audience. This includes the ghost of Big Bertha, who at first is only visible as a grotesque distorted image in curved reflective surfaces, but who later stalks Hana aggressively like the unstoppable entity in It Follows (2014).

It is also there in the visual framing of Hana’s isolated father. He sits in the shadows of her parents’ home, too big to comfortably leave the house, a source of family shame.

We may be sharing Hana’s terrifying experience of body dysmorphia – at her lowest point she lies in a literal pit of trash. But the film also recycles the dehumanising cultural narratives about fatness that contribute to it.

Saccharine frequently includes images of and allusions to the Anatomical Venus. These life-sized wax models designed by Italian sculptor Clemente Susini between 1780 and 1782, were shaped like beautiful, naked reclining women, complete with long human hair, whose abdomens could be opened to reveal layers of organs.

These unsettling “sleeping beauties” reflect a cultural ideal, and invite a disquieting and almost necrophiliac gaze. They posit true feminine perfection is an impossibility only to be found in death – the ultimate objectification.

Hana’s time in the dissection room, and her obsession with bodies, raises uncomfortable questions about where our cultural norms and knowledge come from, and what their (un)natural end point might be.

Saccharine is ultimately a timely and impactful film, even if its initially tight focus dissipates somewhat by the end. It is a stylish take on female-centric body horror with a distinct vision and sensibility – although its approach to bodies may leave the viewer queasy.

Saccharine is in cinemas now.

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In Australia, if you are experiencing difficulties in your relationships with food and your body, you can contact the Butterfly Foundation’s national helpline on 1800 33 4673 (or via their online chat). In New Zealand, you can contact JourneyED.

Erin Harrington does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/09/saccharine-is-a-body-horror-film-for-the-ozempic-era/