Saccharine

Saccharine (2026) is an Australian supernatural body-horror film written and directed by Natalie Erika James (Relic). It premiered at Sundance on 22 January 2026. Midori Francis plays Hana, a lovelorn medical student with a history of disordered eating, and Danielle Macdonald, Madeleine Madden and Robert Taylor appear in the cast.

Hana sees a classmate who has lost a dramatic amount of weight and learns about a secret, costly weight-loss "pill" called the Gray. It works with no effort, but strange things follow: reflections that are not her own, and a growing sense that something is living inside her. Her need to keep up the supply pushes her past medical ethics.

The film mixes campus drama, a sapphic longing, dark comedy and ghost-story dread. It treats an eating disorder as an internal battle nobody else can see, and it uses horror to make that battle visible.

James and Francis have both described the film as a heightened, absurd way of keeping the emotional truth of living with an eating disorder or addiction: an isolating internal struggle that is horrifying and sometimes absurd. The film suggests that consuming a smaller self cannot heal shame. Hana is not just losing weight. She is swallowing someone else's body and story, and she has to reckon with that. Its ending reads as a push toward self-acceptance, but critics disagree on whether it earns that message.

One reading sees an empathetic portrait of addiction and self-acceptance. Another, voiced by some viewers and critics, finds that it punishes its protagonist and clashes with its own message by lingering on food and bodies with disgust. The haunting can be read literally, or as Hana's internalised shame made visible. The central sapphic relationship also invites the "want to be her or be with her" reading.

The film premiered at Sundance as the push for GLP-1 drugs and weight-loss supplements was intensifying, as Roger Ebert's review noted. It follows James's Relic and joins recent body-horror films about female bodies and beauty standards. Viewers compared its ending to The Ugly Stepsister. Its Australian production also sits in the country's growing horror scene.

Reviews were mixed. Critics praised the stylish, distressing body horror and the performance of Midori Francis, whom James credits with anchoring the absurd situations. Common criticisms were that the film throws too many ideas together, that the camera positioning and tone are muddled, and that its themes arrive late. Some viewers also objected to the ending as punishing Hana, and to the near-absence of men and the focus on a female-coded disorder. The overall verdict is an ambitious but uneven film.