I’m a blind film critic. Generally, the focus is from that viewpoint, though I am other things. I’m also gay, male, 40-something, white, American, Floridian, and also… fat. And, by all means, exchange that word with what you feel comfortable. Plump, fluffy, plus sized, overweight, thick, dealer’s choice. Fat is quick, cuts to the point, though it’s one of those words that other people shouldn’t use toward you.It’s funny how we have such odd conversations about weight, and we’ve become such a health centric, diet deranged, quick solution culture. Do I count calories? Is it the south beach diet or the Atkins Diet? Will Olestra help, maybe Ozempic. If I walk five miles, is that enough? If you fret consistently over your body, your image, what you eat, and how much, director Natalie Erika James has a film for you.

It’s also a horror movie.As if the whole weight struggle isn’t real enough, James has turned it into a parable on how far someone is willing to go for a quick solution. The film centers on Hannah (Midori Francis) is a med student, working her way to becoming a doctor, and she’s in that stage where she and her classmates are working on cadavers. She and her close group of friends get one to work on, an obese body they nickname Bertha. Hannah feels even more self conscious when she notices she and the dead body are wearing the same nail polish. Hannah is trying to keep her weight under control, but she’s a bit of an emotional eater, and things at home with her mom, and primarily her dad, aren’t going great. She has no love life, and is worried about her stretch marks. When she bumps into an old friend, she finds out she lost a ton of weight from this radical secret pill. Hannah takes a sample, tests it, and finds out what it is. Human Ash. Her moral quandary goes out the door, and the ends justify the means, so of course she takes the pill. Then, realizing how expensive it is, she decides to create her own formula, since she has access to body parts. But, the more she consumes, the more she becomes troubled by the side effects. Sure, she’s losing weight, but there’s something that seems to be attaching itself to her, and it comes at random variables. Hannah tries to science the shit out of this, keeping logs, and figuring out what triggers specific reactions, but things keep getting weirder, and Hannah is soon out of her depth. What is happening to Hannah?

James is a patient director, one who believes in building strong characters, giving Francis time to really show us who Hannah is. The supporting cast is all built up around her, at least a little, so we can wonder if these effects will spread to her friends. The film is secretly unabashedly queer, as Hannah’s sexuality is brought up a few times. Once, at a bar, her friend says Hannah is being checked out by a girl at the bar, and another time, a character thrusts themselves onto Hannah. I’d say it is vibing on sexual assault, except Hannah clearly has a crush, so it would be like if your crush just grabbed and kissed you. I think a lot of people would give that interaction a pass. But there’s no real strong male presence, as her father is maybe the most prominent male figure, and he’s barely in the film.

Saccharine made me think of several films. It has the medical gore aspect of Birth/Rebirth, where because Hannah is a med student, most of the gore is natural and through her process as a med student. It reminded me of It follows, as Hannah is haunted by something she can’t see, but has the ability to interact with the world around her. It reminded me of THe Substance, in terms of desperation and taking some weird drug that someone recommended to you.I was even reminded of the film Pathology, due to all the corpses.

I liked the movie. Francis is excellent as Hannah, and pulls us in to her journey. Other critics will deep dive on the merits of this film against body positivity, but I was snacking during this. It didn’t bother me. It could bother you, but it all depends on where you’re at in your journey. If you do not have a strong body image of yourself, this film will chip away at you faster.

The gore is specific, and natural, not gratuitous and absurd. The scares lean on thematic, instead of being jump scares all the time. The movie has real characters, with real stakes, and makes them complicated enough for us to like them, and not want to see a nihilistic ending where they all die. I gotta say, while IFC/Shudder picked this up at Sundance, if I had been the rep in that meeting, I would have told Ms. James that we were cutting the last two-ish minutes.I was riding the wave of this film, and that hard turn at the end made no sense, opened up a fresh set of questions with no answers, and walked away.

My audio description was from Australian, and done by The Substation, and they did an excellent job. One of the things I liked was that because Hannah occasionally does experience something in a room, the description mentions that a room looks empty. It does this even in scenes without a payoff, so it doesn’t just come across as telegraphing to the audience when a jump scare might be coming. It also freaked me out, because one of the things that always gets me is when someone stretches their mouth inhumanly large, which happens in this film. I still am shook by Julianne Moore’s The Forgotten, because I remember the bad guys in that could stretch their jaw. You have your fears, I have mine.

For me, it didn’t make me ashamed of my weight, or trigger me. I had some snacks while watching the film, and I just ate a piece of chocolate while typing this review. However, I don’t have an eating disorder, or depression due to body image. There are people who should avoid this film, and while my thing isn’t telling you how this film feeds into the psyche of a plus sized culture, I have the presence of mind to know some people shouldn’t see this. As far as quantifying it further, that kind of thing doesn’t bother me. A few years back, I left a film community because they banned all talk of the film The Whale, because it would be too triggering. Look, film is difficult. My current reigning favorite of this year is a difficult film. Last year, my favorite was pretty spot on in shining a light on bullying.I like warm and fuzzy comfort movies as much as the next person, but sometimes, I like a film to challenge me. Oddly enough, while Saccharine should have pushed me outside my comfort zone, it just didn’t. Truthfully, neither did The whale, despite Fraser’s excellent performance.

But, I truly despise that last little coda. The movie had essentially resolved itself, and right at the end, Natalie Erika James just decides to open a new envelope. Let’s tackle something briefly we didn’t really get into yet. It would be like if at the end of Sinners, in that final scene, where they meet one last time to tag everything together, if right after Jordan and the ladies visit their old friend, their old friend has another scene where he walks outside, dons his hat, turns into a werewolf and then the film just cuts. You’d want to know. The audience would want to know what the suggestion was, the implication, and Saccharine’s ending is a bit like that. It’s a tag that isn’t so totally unrelated the the rest of the film, but opens a lot of unnecessary doors and questions it didn’t need at the end, and it can’t answer any of them.

James proves herself a promising voice in horror, as a patient director not interested in amassing jump scares, but instead investing in a parable about our unhealthy fixation on our bodies, and often at our detriment, the drive to do anything to lose weight. And, she does mean anything.

Fresh: 7.8/10