Natalie Erika James’s Saccharine is a gripping body horror for the Ozempic era. Here’s why this Shudder acquisition, starring Midori Francis, is essential viewing for horror fans.
When Natalie Erika James premiered her debut feature, Relic, at Sundance in 2020, the film felt similarly inevitable: a haunted-house story that turned dementia into a crumbling, malevolent architecture. It was personal horror, sharpened by grief, and it announced James as a filmmaker who understands that the most terrifying monsters are the ones we inherit. She followed it with Apartment 7A, a studio-backed prequel to Rosemary’s Baby, a polished exercise in legacy horror that proved her technical range but lacked the emotional wallop of her first film. Now, with Saccharine, James returns to independent filmmaking and to the terrain she knows best: the body as a haunted house.
The timing is uncanny. GLP‑1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy have reshaped the weight‑loss landscape, flooding social‑media feeds with before‑and‑after photos and normalising pharmaceutical shortcuts to thinness. Eating disorders, always lurking in the shadow of diet culture, are having a loud cultural moment. The horror genre has noticed.
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance smashed into the conversation in 2024 with its lurid, latex‑drenched take on female body insecurity. The Ugly Stepsister, Raw, The Neon Demon — each has staked a claim on the territory where beauty standards become body horror. Saccharine enters this crowded field not as an imitator but as a distinct, if occasionally overstuffed, contribution. It is a ghost story, a queer romance, a familial trauma excavation, and a gross‑out body horror, sometimes all at once.
Saccharine wields body horror as a scalpel, cutting through the skin of diet culture to expose the raw, unsettling truth beneath. Natalie Erika James’s third feature is a feverish, flawed, and deeply personal reckoning with the tyranny of body image in the Ozempic era.
: Natalie Erika James Serves Up Body Horror for the Ozempic Era
A Horror Movie Review by Hope Madden
Body image, binge behavior, shame, and desire fuel Natalie Erika James’s (Relic) third feature, Saccharine. From its fascinating opening sequence, you’ll be glad if you don’t buy popcorn.
That opening, scored with sensual moaning, cuts between extreme close ups of various body parts of a lithe woman on an elliptical, and extreme close ups of binge eating, but in reverse. As if the eater is removing those sloppy snacks rather than inhaling them.
Hana (Midori Francis) is the eater. She’s also the person eyeing the woman on the elliptical, Alanya (Madeleine Madden), a trainer who invites Hana to join her 12-week diet and exercise program. Profoundly self-conscious but smitten, Hana agrees.
Then she runs into old high school classmate Melissa (Annie Shapero), unrecognizable thanks to weight loss brought about by a technically illegal supplement called grey. What Melissa doesn’t know but med student Hana figures out is that the supplement is human ash.
Hana takes it anyway, loses weight, but the side effects are hardly what she bargained for. In the Ozempic era, the idea that someone might swallow pills of human ash to lose weight without regard to consequences feels right.
There’s a fetishistic quality to many of the film’s sequences. These become the sticky residue holding together a ghost story, a tale of generational and cultural identity crisis, and some serious body horror. That’s an awful lot for James to pack into her 112-minute run time. Though she doesn’t resolve everything, it’s the surprises and loose ends that are most intriguing.
Francis impresses as the fractured main character, driven and yet unable to control her binging, however hard she tries. James expertly uses the sympathetic, believable central figure to wind viewers through startling sensual indulgences punctuated by family drama.
It would feel overpacked were it not for Francis’s grounded, compelling turn, supported nicely by the film’s small ensemble (Madden, Danielle Macdonald, Showko Showfukutel). Just when it looks like the family drama horror trope has won out, James surprises again, and the film leaves you stunned and wondering.
Objectification, internalized beautify standards, and the fetishistic nature of consumption drive Hana’s behavior and James’s film. Art over the post credits amplifies an aesthetic that James might have used to better effect throughout the movie. Still, Saccharine delivers something intimate and disturbing—too unsettling to be solved with Pepto Bismol.
