Eating is disgusting, right, folks?
Well, some people seem to think so, not least of all the director Natalie Erika James, who revels in showing us nauseating images of greedy mouths smeared with cake crumbs and grease and spittle and blood in her new horror film, Saccharine. Human bodies are also disgusting, apparently, or at least those that are made up to look slightly overweight, or quite a bit overweight, or morbidly obese.
Hana is a medical student who seems to want to lose some weight, but who has trouble doing that, partly because she continues to cram jelly doughnuts and potato chips into herself in excruciating closeup. One day, she runs into an old friend, and she’s given a secret diet pill, one that takes effect pretty quickly. It’s also a really expensive pill, so Hana, being the enterprising med student she is, analyzes the pill and learns it’s made of cremated human remains. Wouldn’t you know it, in class, she and her fellow students are dissecting what is probably a 600-pound deceased woman, so Hana, still enterprising, steals a rib cage here and some organs there and starts to make her own pills.
Things work great, except maybe Hana has now invited the spirit of the dead woman she’s eating to cause some problems for her. And James has enough ideas for her movie to keep things mostly interesting, plus Midori Francis, who plays Hana, is more than game for when things get wild, as they must, in the third act. But it’s not really ever clear what James is trying to communicate to us about any of this. I’ll be charitable and assume that she doesn’t actually believe overweight people and eating things are all as repulsive as she makes them out to be in the movie, but it would be nice to have some indication that she had a coherent point of view to express. Instead, we’re left with the overarching suspicion that the director is just very pleased with herself, and if we needed any confirmation, well, the closing credits provide exactly that.
Saccharine is in theaters.
