🎬 Saccharine 📽️

The film follows Hana (Midori Francis), a first-year medical student plagued by intense self-worth and body image issues. Her fixation intensifies when she runs into a former friend who has lost so much weight she is practically unrecognizable, attributing it to a secretive new line of weight-loss pills. Desperate to shrink her own body and catch the attention of her crush Alanya—a popular fitness influencer and university gym trainer—Hana tries to acquire the pills, but finds them completely out of her financial reach.

Driven by obsession, Hana takes a free sample of the pills into her university's anatomy lab to analyze their contents. She makes a shocking discovery: the primary active ingredient is human ashes

Unable to purchase the actual product, Hana begins clandestine midnight raids on the university's medical cadavers, grinding down human bones from the corpses she is dissecting to manufacture her own crude supply. The "diet" works—her waistline shrinks dramatically—but the physical transformation comes at a horrific supernatural cost. As she wastes away, she is relentlessly terrorized by a hungry ghost that grows in size, violence, and malicious strength with every ounce of flesh Hana loses.

💡 Critical Reception & Website Notes 🧠
The "Ozempic Era" Connection: Critics have widely pointed out that Saccharine acts as a dark, cautionary allegory for the modern obsession with rapid, medically-assisted physical transformations, explicitly drawing parallels to current societal anxieties over modern diet culture

Visceral Audience Reactions: During its festival screenings at Sundance and Berlin, the film became notorious for causing physical discomfort in the theater, featuring grueling, cyclical sequences of binge eating and purging that led to several high-profile walkouts.

Standout Performance: Midori Francis has received unanimous praise for her performance as Hana, with reviewers noting her absolute commitment to the raw, grueling physical and emotional demands of the role

Listen before watching Audio feature