A lovelorn medical student becomes terrorized by a hungry ghost after taking part in an obscure weight-loss craze. A film by Natalie Erika James, starring Midori Francis, Danielle Macdonald, Madeleine Madden, Robert Taylor, Showko Showfukutei, Octavia Barron Martin, Anna Adams, Annie Shapero, Louisa Mignone, Joseph Baldwin, Emily Milledge, Gemma Bird Matheson, Lucy Goleby, Susan Godfrey, Lisa Crittenden, Hanna Harvey, Peter Jiang, Mert Ergec, Martyn Jones, Robin Northover, Manu Suri, Carmen Borg, Eirene Hogan, Mackenzie McLaren, Caity Viant, Miah Carter, Nariman Dein, Maia Mitchell, Xia Hudson, and Laura Du Vé.
SACCHARINE
Medical student Hana (Midori Francis) has been struggling to lose weight for years. She desperately wants to drop down to 60 kg, but her light workout routine and uncontrollable sweet tooth keep getting in the way.
Following yet another failed diet, Hana lowers her goal weight to 60 kilograms. The next day after a gym session, she is surprised when Alanya (Madeleine Madden), a trainer she happens to have a crush on, invites her to sign up for a 12-week fitness challenge. Hana initially declines and jokes that she is simply not cut out for that kind of commitment. However, Alanya is incredibly persuasive. She reveals the program is for her master’s in psychology, and charms Hana into finally joining.
In the gross anatomy dissection lab, Professor Kasab (Louisa Mignone) tells her students that for the next twelve weeks, these donors will serve as both their teachers and their first patients. She notes that the class will have the opportunity to honor their lives at the end of the semester, reminding everyone to proceed with dignity and care. Then, she instructs her students to make their first incision down the sternum.
That evening, Hana celebrates her birthday at a local bar with her friends Nikita (Gemma Bird Matheson) and Josie (Danielle Macdonald). Nikita spots a beautiful woman staring at Hana and encourages her to make a move. After some nudging from Josie, Hana agrees but heads for the bathroom first.
Before she can get there, the woman approaches and calls her name. It takes a moment for Hana to realize the gorgeous stranger is actually her old high school friend, Melissa (Annie Shapero). Seeing Melissa’s dramatic weight loss leaves Hana surprised and slightly envious of her appearance.
As they catch up, Melissa shares that her transformation is all thanks to a pricey, experimental new pill called Gray. She tells a skeptical Hana that no matter what she eats, the drug simply melts the weight away. Melissa pulls a capsule from her purse and offers it to Hana. Hana’s medical training screams that it is unsafe to take mysterious street drugs, causing her to hesitate.
Melissa pushes further, showing an old photo of her former self and insisting that girl no longer exists. Against all logic and good judgment, Hana gives in to her desperate desire to lose weight and swallows the pill. Smiling, Melissa hands her a second one, instructing Hana to take it the next day and report back if she notices a difference.
Josie and Nikita interrupt the reunion, arriving at the table with celebratory shots. From there, Hana lets loose, drinking and eating heavily until she blacks out. She wakes up the following morning in her apartment, finding the floor littered with empty pizza boxes and food containers. The mess suggests she came home and ate even more before passing out, though she has absolutely no memory of doing so.
Preparing for the worst, Hana cautiously steps on the scale, only to discover she has dropped a full kilogram overnight. Realizing the mysterious pill actually works, her initial shock quickly shifts into a suspicious curiosity about what exactly is inside the drug.
Desperate for more, Hana sends Melissa a text asking about the price of the supplements. Moments later, Melissa replies that a minimum order costs 5,000 dollars. Coming from a modest family, Hana does not have that kind of money lying around.
Instead of taking the second pill as Melissa instructed, Hana brings the capsule to her medical school lab. She hopes to analyze the powder inside and uncover the secret behind its magical weight-loss properties. However, the test results leave her deeply unsettled. Finding that the substance is primarily calcium phosphate, Hana draws on her anatomy knowledge to make a dark and disturbing deduction. The mysterious weight-loss powder is actually human ash.
During another dissection lab, Hana places a ribcage extracted by her classmate Ryan (Joseph Baldwin) into a yellow anatomical waste bag. When class ends, she lingers at the sink, pretending to wash her hands while she waits the others out. Once the room is completely empty, she quickly moves to retrieve the bones.
Hana places the stolen ribcage into a B&L Tetlow electric kiln to cremate it. Taking the brittle bone fragments back to her apartment, she grinds them into a fine powder using a kitchen mortar and pestle.
She then begins her own experiment, carefully scooping 5mg of the ash into an empty capsule. Standing on her bathroom scale, she swallows her first dose with a glass of water. However, the moment she steps down and leaves the room, the dial on the scale mysteriously shifts, as if something invisible has just stepped onto it.
Hana commits to the training challenge and soon experiences an insatiable hunger. Assuming it is just a normal byproduct of her workouts, she ignores it. She eats constantly, yet her weight steadily decreases as a result of her homemade pill. She dismisses the unsettling encounter, noting in her diary that it is likely just a hallucination or a bizarre side effect linked to the ash.
Hana continues to eat whatever she wants and enjoys her life while her weight magically melts away. Impressed by this rapid progress, Alanya posts a photo of the two of them on Instagram and tags Hana. In the caption, Alanya publicly praises Hana’s incredible transformation and expresses how proud she is of her 12-Week Challenge member’s hard work.
Meanwhile, a loud thud in the apartment startles Hana. She snaps her head toward the hallway, only to see nothing unusual. Then she catches sight of the kettle. Reflected in its curved metal is a pale figure. To prove she is not just hallucinating again, she drags a full-length mirror into the kitchen and angles it toward the hall. The mirror shows an empty hall, while the kettle still reflects the ghostly presence. She deduces that the entity is only visible in convex surfaces.
Grabbing a spoon, she stares into the back of it and slowly walks backward down the hall. The distorted image comes into sharp focus, leaving Hana paralyzed with shock. The figure is Bertha, the cadaver her medical group has been dissecting in the lab. Hana is forced to accept that the spirit of the woman whose bones she is eating is now stalking her. A terrifying pattern soon emerges. The more weight Hana loses, the larger and more imposing the spirit becomes.
How much are you willing to lose?
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A film by Natalie Erika James, starring Midori Francis, Danielle Macdonald, Madeleine Madden, Robert Taylor, Showko Showfukutei, Octavia Barron Martin, Anna Adams, Annie Shapero, Louisa Mignone, Joseph Baldwin, Emily Milledge, Gemma Bird Matheson, Lucy Goleby, Susan Godfrey, Lisa Crittenden, Hanna Harvey, Peter Jiang, Mert Ergec, Martyn Jones, Robin Northover, Manu Suri, Carmen Borg, Eirene Hogan, Mackenzie McLaren, Caity Viant, Miah Carter, Nariman Dein, Maia Mitchell, Xia Hudson, and Laura Du Vé.
Written and directed by American-Australian filmmaker Natalie Erika James, SACCHARINE is a supernatural horror film that follows a medical student who becomes obsessed with weight loss and finds herself haunted by a hungry spirit.
I really like the setup of a drug that helps the user lose weight without any effort. It sounds like something straight out of science fiction. Then the story takes a swift and terrifying turn when it is revealed that the main ingredient is human ash.
At this point, the movie shifts into the supernatural. This ash serves as a bizarre interdimensional medium, funneling consumed food directly to a haunting spirit. It initially made me think the protagonist was just hallucinating. No ordinary person would be so calm and dismissive, continuing to live in their apartment knowing an invisible entity is right there with them. A normal reaction would be to flee or seek help, not to act like nothing is wrong. It just defies all logical thinking.
The introduction of the protagonist’s family adds a compelling psychological layer to the narrative. Her father, Travis (Robert Taylor), suffers from advanced diabetes resulting in morbid obesity. Her fear of finding herself in the exact same condition is completely understandable. It provides a grounded motivation for her desperate need to lose weight.
However, the movie struggles to maintain its momentum. There is literally nothing major happening for the first forty minutes. The film could benefit from tighter editing and a shorter runtime, rather than filling every act with B-roll of constant chewing or a tipped honey bottle slowly covering a desk.
The movie is incredibly depressing, acting as a vacuum that sucks the happiness out of everything. Her father is dying, her mother is crying, her best friend is concerned, and her trainer is alarmed. Basically, everyone is worried about the protagonist, but she just denies their help and pushes them all away until she finally realizes she cannot fix the problem by herself.
I feel like the film might work better if the ghost were purely a manifestation of the protagonist’s mind. However, the narrative repeatedly proves that the entity physically exists. In the library scene, for instance, the ghost violently knocks a computer off a desk and sweeps books from a shelf, even though the protagonist is the only person who can see it in reflections or her nightmares. Furthermore, the ending is entirely underwhelming and makes zero sense. After finally banishing the spirit, the protagonist is abruptly revealed to be a cannibal. It is a completely baffling twist that stands out as the most confusing moment of the entire movie.
Despite the film’s structural flaws, Midori Francis and Madeleine Madden deliver strong performances. The movie also executes one of the most unsettling visual effects I have ever seen. When Hana is possessed by the ghost, her right pupil slides sideways and vanishes completely behind her eyeball. It is an anatomical impossibility that is deeply terrifying to watch, easily surpassing the standard horror trope where a victim’s eyes simply turn white or roll backward.
SACCHARINE Premiered at Sundance Film Festival in the Midnight section on 22 January 2026. The film was theatrically released in the United States on 22 May and in Australia on 9 July.
