America has diet culture almost baked in at this point. Making our obsession with weight loss an unfortunate evergreen subject for any artist to comment on. Writer-director Natalie Erika James didn’t necessarily set out to give a take on the rise of GLP-1s in Saccharine, but that’s what it’s become.
Saccharine is about Hana (Midori Francis), a medical student who takes part in the latest diet fad… eating human ashes. She soon becomes terrorized by a sinister force that she cannot seem to shake. Because no matter where you go, there you are.
Saccharine
“I always knew I wanted to create a film or write a story exploring this kind of subject matter, which had a lot to do with how I was brought up, but certainly in the early 2000s — there were those tabloids where bodies were being torn apart,” James tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It felt like there was a time when we stepped away from that [diet culture], but in a way I feel like it’s just been lying dormant or cultures swinging in certain ways.”
For many of us growing up, these things were mostly relegated to TV, newsstands, and the school yard. But the rise of social media over the decades has made these types of body shaming even more inescapable. James is fully aware that she isn’t the first horror filmmaker to tackle this topic. So she employs stunning and jarring visuals to give it a fresh, modern take. “Horror is amazing at externalizing what’s internal and allowing you to play with quite extreme or surreal imagery to depict that,” James explains.
“That was my initial reaction to reading the script, that this is not the vehicle I would instinctively think to tackle this issue, and yet it works so well,” Francis adds. “No matter how otherworldly or absurd things got, it was always rooted in the feelings of being in the grips of compulsion or obsession or body checking. How it can sometimes feel, when you’re dealing with a mental battle or struggle or addiction, nobody sees what’s going on, but it’s so loud inside your own brain.”
Audience Reactions
However, some of these otherworldly visuals affected viewers in wildly unexpected ways. “Someone in our Sundance screening apparently passed out and then had to leave,” James says. “I didn’t expect that it would be to that extreme.”
“It’s just confronting to even talk about it openly, or even depict binging on screen… It’s just a very intense thing and certainly requires trigger warnings,” she adds.
It doesn’t have any explicit warnings, but James has been transparent that this isn’t for someone actively struggling with ED. In media dealing with EDs, there is a very fine line between showing an honest depiction of someone struggling and giving advice on how to be “successful” at it. A line Saccharine is willing to walk because of how important this topic is.
“Eating disorders [and] addiction [are] all things very personal to me, personal to afflictions shared by my family. I knew that whoever wrote this script that there was an authenticity there, a real voice and it was bold,” Francis says. “Nat has that in spades.”
And James implores people to dig deeper. “I hope that people just go beyond the surface reading of that and look at what journey Hana is actually on to unpack those beliefs within herself as well,” she says.
Saccharine is currently playing in theaters and will begin streaming on Shudder July 24.
