‘Saccharine’ Berlinale Review: Slimming Down to the Bone

With three features under her belt, the Australian-Japanese filmmaker behind Relic and Apartment 7A has quietly become one of the most reliable new voices in contemporary horror. Her movies tend to operate like family melodramas wrapped in a membrane of physical and psychological dread—domestic trauma that leaks outward until it stains the body itself. And Saccharine sticks to that program. If anything, it pushes it further: by sheer plot mechanics alone, this is her closest brush yet with full-blown body horror—a film in which the most shocking, and at times outright revolting, spectacle is the human body and everything it consumes.

Saccharine slots neatly into the post-The Substance wave of films weaponizing flesh to talk about self-optimization culture—that compulsive, algorithm-fed fixation on youth, beauty, and “wellness” at any cost. You can see similar anxieties coursing through shows like The Beauty. In all of them, horror kicks in precisely when men and women become convinced that perfection is attainable quickly, painlessly—like some kind of magic, frictionless drug. Of course, it never is. And what follows isn’t just fatal. It’s disfiguring.

Midori Francis plays Hana, a young woman who sees herself as obese (she isn’t) and spends her days doomscrolling TikToks about weight loss hacks. But more than the videos, her real fixation is Alanya (Madeleine Madden), the impossibly perfect trainer at her gym—and the object of her not-so-secret crush. Hana doesn’t just want to be with her. She wants to be her. She signs up for an intensive twelve-week program in the hope of sculpting herself into something worthy of Alanya’s gaze. The problem? She also really loves junk food.

Enter the miracle cure. One night at a bar, she runs into a former university classmate she barely recognizes. The woman has dropped a startling amount of weight and happily shares her secret: a daily pill that allows you to eat whatever you want and still shed pounds. It sounds like snake oil. It isn’t. Hana begins losing weight at an alarming rate, regardless of what—or how much—she eats. But there’s a catch. A med student who spends her days dissecting cadavers, Hana suspects there’s something off about the drug’s formulation. After doing some digging, she realizes that instead of paying the exorbitant asking price, she might be able to manufacture it herself using… materials already at hand.

From there on, Saccharine tracks Hana’s increasingly grotesque “progress.” Her rapid weight loss alarms her mother, her friends, even Alanya, who doubts that twelve weeks of HIIT could possibly account for such a transformation. Hana insists she’s fine, even as her secret binge sessions—lavishly detailed in queasy close-ups—suggest otherwise. And whatever’s behind the pills’ efficacy isn’t strictly pharmaceutical. The explanation lands somewhere between the biochemical and the ghostly, tangled up with personal (and familial) baggage that refuses to stay buried.

Part primal hunger, part spectral possession, the film isn’t especially interested in jump scares. Its currency is disgust: the gore involved in procuring the pills, the feral way Hana devours food, the intimate close-ups that collapse the distance between appetite and eroticism. The director lingers on reflections, perceptual distortions, that strange zone where sexuality and gastronomy start to overlap. Hana is ravenous in every sense of the word—and that ravenousness eventually mutates into something else entirely.

As it goes on, Saccharine does become a bit repetitive, and its ghost-logic grows so metaphorically slippery that it’s hard to parse as a tangible threat. This isn’t a medical thriller in the vein of the titles mentioned earlier—the drug is almost beside the point—but rather a queasy meditation on how beauty culture folds into decay and death. Hana’s anatomical investigations—many involving obese corpses—make one thing brutally clear: the gap between what’s visible on the surface and what festers underneath is vast. And there’s no cheat code to make it disappear.