Saccharine (2026)
I expected to like this movie from what I heard about it beforehand. Turns out: I loved it! Horror pictures about diet culture often have a way of announcing their themes with a bullhorn and up being a lecture. What we get instead, from director Natalie Erika James, is something closer to a confession, one that happens to have teeth.
The setup: Hana, a medical student, stares into a mirror the way most of us do at some point, and comes away with a tally of flaws instead of a face. So when a new weight loss regimen crosses her path, one considerably stranger than counting kilojoules, she takes the bait. I will not spell out what the regimen involves, because the slow reveal is half the pleasure, and because I have a rule against ruining a good stomach-turn for anyone. Suffice to say the person she has wronged in pursuit of a smaller version of herself does not stay quiet about it. Few of us would, given the circumstances, and fewer still would look as good doing the haunting.
Midori Francis carries the film on her shoulders and never once looks like she is straining under the weight. That might be skilled acting, or the film having a laugh at its own expense.
James, to her credit, barely reaches for a jump scare. The dread accumulates the way it tends to in real life: slowly, through repetition and small denials stacked on top of each other, fed by a culture that will not stop whispering that thinner sits closer to happiness on some imaginary scale. James shoots Melbourne with real style, though the settings stay mundane on purpose: fluorescent share-house kitchens, gym mirrors, university corridors, the kind of places nobody dresses up for. When the practical effects finally arrive, the gruesomeness feels earned, not simply reached for. In my opinion, that patience is the film’s greatest trick, and the one most horror films forget how to pull off these days.
The film is not tidy, though, and pretending otherwise would be doing you a disservice. A subplot involving Hana’s parents, who embody two opposite responses to a lifetime of body scrutiny, pulls focus from the central haunting more than once, and the back half sags before it rediscovers its nerve. Ten minutes could have come out with nothing lost. A film this serious about its subject deserves an audience willing to meet it with the same seriousness, and calling it flawless would be its own small betrayal.
None of that dims what James has pulled off. This is a horror film that understands the ghosts we carry are, more often than not, the ones we invited in ourselves, one bite at a time, and it never once lets us off the hook for it. I left the cinema thinking about the scale in my own bathroom, and that is not something I can say for most films released this year, weight loss drama or otherwise.