Director: Natalie Erika James
Stars: Midori Francis, Madeleine Madden, Danielle Macdonald
Australian filmmaker Natalie Erika James was responsible for possibly the first great horror film of the decade, and while her recent Rosemary’s Baby prequel didn’t quite hit with the same effect, her return to original material warrants inspection. Saccharine finds her crossing subgenres to the realms of queasy body horror with an autopsy of eating disorders, our global obsession with weight regulation and more specifically Asian-Australian anxieties of identity and self-image. There’s a lot to unpack here – a feast if you will – and a thrilling and expansive return to form.
Hana Hitching (a fully committed Midori Francis) is a medical student unhappy with her weight. Her social media is flooded with mixed messages of body positivity and peer pressure to attain the most optimal standards of beauty. Like the most of us, she longs for a quick fix. The sapphic allure of personal trainer Alanya (Madeleine Madden) and her 12 week plan offer a disciplined avenue of achieving her goals. A run-in with her transformed school friend Melissa (Annie Shapero) offers another; the allure of a low-effect prescription of experimental diet pills.
Hana is sensible enough to utilise the equipment at her disposal at uni to run a diagnostic on these miracle pills, only to discover that the active ingredient is human ashes. But her desperation compels her to synthetsise her own, using cremated remains of an obese cadaver nicknamed Bertha that she and her classmates are piecemeal dissecting. The pills work and the weight falls off of Hana like magic, but she also finds herself suddenly haunted by the woman she’s partially devoured – a hungry ghost who can only be appeased through jags of bingeing the sweet, salty and greasy foods that Hana’s desperate to avoid.
James reflects back at us the culture of fat-shaming and discrimination that has become normalised over the past decades – projected both outwardly and inwardly – a world in which even in death we can’t escape criticisms of our weight. Saccharine is a stark warning about our own negatively obsessive compulsions, and the ways in which we eat away at ourselves. Hana’s world is slowly given depth and dimension. We meet her neurotic doting mother fairly early on, from whom Hana has acquired her fixation with her weight, but it isn’t until much later that further familial pressures reveal themselves. Hauntings of a different stripe. Notions of legacy and ancestry along with traditional Chinese folklore feather in a specific milieu of inherited anxieties for Hana, ensuring that this tale is specific and not a broad act of cultural finger-wagging.
Hana’s weight-loss goal creates for Saccharine a somewhat predictable trajectory to follow, an assumed path that James enjoys derailing with new information. After her initial run of bad experiences on her homemade diet pills, Hana rejects her choice and embraces a more natural, holistic approach to her health; a mature, disciplined decision. The problem becomes one of psychological damage, here exponentially exacerbated by the supernatural element that James presses upon her protagonist. Through these methods James is able to visualise the horrors of Hana’s disorder. A fridge becomes a possessed entity that beckons to her, testing her resolve. Elsewhere, Saccharine manages to evoke a truly revolting spin on the Is It Cake? game show popularised on Netflix out of a series of viral videos.
Saccharine shows James eager to show her ability to pivot. She may have pigeonholed herself for now as a horror filmmaker, but that’s still among the most versatile genres to play in. Her latest is a far cry from the locales and aesthetics of her debut Relic. It inhabits modern, overtly populated spaces, and the film itself utilises fluent, urgent techniques like montage to exhilarating effect. A gorgeous mid-film masturbatory example mixes the eroticism of food, women and the dead to delirious effect both tasty and taboo, while Hannah Peel’s breathy, eroginous score over a queer sex scene gets so hetup that it almost barks. Saccharine is pink, puckish, rancid and young in its imagery and concerns.
At nearly two hours, there’s a sense that James could have pulled this in tighter; that she takes advantage of almost too many opportunities to illustrate Hana’s descent through the emotional wringer. At her lowest, she regards herself as akin to a trough full of medical waste. As much as Hana has a scientific head on her shoulders, the irrationality of her obsessions win out time and again, and lead her into a self-harming spiral. We want so badly for her to extricate herself from this self-made trap that some of James’ turns feel cuttingly cruel. While the finale is her coup de grace and a showcase for the movie’s practical and special effects make-up departments, it’s a little gut-wrenching (pun intended). Saccharine positions itself firmly as a tragic cautionary tale; a gutsy, gloopy recession from the world goaded on by external stressors; a recognition that it can feel like we’re constantly at war with the world, and that it’s all too easy to slip and let that consume us. In spite of that title, the outlook is decidedly bleak, but James’ approach is electric once more. She’s back on track and then some.
The Lost Highway Hotel 