The body horror genre has been around for a long time, nibbling at the edges of the zeitgeist, but it seems to be having a moment, or about to. Every new title – recent examples including The Ugly Stepsister and Together – arrives in the shadow of Coralie Fargeat’s hideously impressive The Substance, a rare example of a sticky-icky flick that spectacularly defied the high/low art divide and even snagged a handful of Oscar nominations. Also having a moment (a terrifically long moment!) are Australian horror movies, with recent years delivering oodles of critically acclaimed titles – among them Talk to Me, Late Night With the Devil, Leviticus, You’ll Never Find Me, You Won’t Be Alone, Sissy, Relic, The Invisible Man, Bring Her Back and Beast of War.
Into that Venn diagram overlay between “body horror” and “Australian” comes Saccharine, the new film from writer-director Natalie Erika James, which takes a bold route into exploring eating disorders and body dysmorphia, demonstrating yet again the great power and malleability of horror movies as vessels for cultural commentary. James has a knack for visualising core themes: first in her excellent feature debut Relic, a horror film about dementia that illustrates time’s deteriorating forces in individual images: a mouldy fruit bowl, an overrun tennis court.
Saccharine is yet another boldly directed and intoxicatingly creepy production from James; it is stuffed with weirdly unsettling depictions of food, beginning with extreme closeups of a person gorging on jam doughnuts, the footage unfolding in reverse. Included in this montage are images of an athletic figure working out, and we soon learn that the person eating is medical student Hana (Midori Francis), while the person working out is her gym trainer Alanya (Madeleine Madden), with whom Hana is obsessed.
She’s also obsessed with losing weight. So when Hana bumps into an old high school friend (Annie Shapero) who has shed so much weight she’s virtually unrecognisable, she’s open to sampling one of the miracle weight loss pills she’s championing, which have an almost instant effect. After studying the compounds of the pills, Hana makes the Soylent Green-esque discovery that they contain human ashes, though this doesn’t deter her. In fact she starts producing her own DIY versions of them, using the corpse of a very large woman who donated her body to science, meanly referred to as “Big Bertha.”
Madeleine Madden as Alanya in Saccharine. Photograph: Maslow Entertainment
Riffing on the lore of the “hungry ghost”, a Buddhist mythology often interpreted as an allegory for insatiable desire, the question of course becomes: how bad are things going to get for Hana, and how much of that horror James is willing to shove in our faces? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Though Saccharine is less a barrage than a slow infection, with a well-judged atmosphere that feels equally haunting and haunted.
As Hana, Francis’s put-through-the-wringer performance hits all the right beats, bringing a measure of restraint and nuance to a film that, while fiendishly unsubtle in many respects, is also very carefully layered. James folds together supernatural horror into corporeal dread without leaning on tired ghost-movie cliches. Even when the film does, eventually, deploy more conventional elements, there’s a sense that the director is taking a stranger path through the forest, with several tricks up her sleeve to prick our interest and keep us on our toes.
Another grossly impressive visual embellishment involves presenting the insides of humans in ways that make them look like food, playing with aesthetic elements that seem simultaneously desirable and disgusting. Saccharine offers plenty to, er, chew over on the way home … but maybe this isn’t a film to chat about over dinner afterwards.
Saccharine is in Australian cinemas from 9 July and available to stream on Shudder in the US from 24 July
In Australia, the Butterfly Foundation is at 1800 33 4673. In the UK, Beat can be contacted on 0808-801-0677. In the US, help is available at nationaleatingdisorders.org or by calling ANAD’s eating disorders hotline at 800-375-7767. Other international helplines can be found at Eating Disorder Hope