1 of 5 | Midori Francis stars in “Saccharine,” in theaters Friday. Photo courtesy of Independent Film Company and Shudder
Midori Francis, Danielle Macdonald and Madeleine Madden said they related to the theme of their horror movie Saccharine, in theaters Friday. Francis plays Hana, a medical student who ingests human ash to lose weight.
In a recent Zoom interview with UPI, Francis said the metaphor of weight loss obsession turning horrific was easy to imagine. Natalie Erika James wrote and directed the film.
“This subject matter is already a horror movie,” Francis said. “Does that make sense? It just did not seem like a big stretch.”
Hana analyzes the compound of an expensive diet pill and discovers human ash is the main component. With budgetary constraints, she manufactures her own pills using her school’s cadaver.
Hana loses weight dramatically but also sees ghostly visions of the cadaver. James began writing the film in 2019, before Ozempic and other weight loss drugs became so common.
“It’s so much drawn from my personal experience of growing up with parents who were really opposites in terms of how they related to their bodies and food and all of the mixed messaging that I grew up with,” James said. “In some ways, it’s been in the works for decades.”
Hana’s mother has been pressuring her to eat less prior to the pills. Her father, whom the audience meets later in the film, triggers other familial issues with Hana.
Hana’s classmate, Josie (Macdonald), eventually calls out the underlying issue. At Hana’s thinnest, Josie tells Hana she won’t feel better about herself no matter how much weight she loses.
“Obviously, Josie is pointing out this overarching fact that we all know realistically, but it’s not that easy to just come true,” Macdonald said. “Getting to say that was great because you kind of know it’s true but it doesn’t mean that you feel it every day.”
At the same time as the pills, Hana signs up for a fitness study with Alanya (Madden). Even Alanya becomes alarmed at how fast Hana loses weight.
While Madden said she does exercise and eats healthy like Alanya, she struggled with seeing herself as the film’s fitness guru. Madden credited James and her costars for having sensitive conversations about body image.
“Particularly as women, certainly my body changes drastically over the month,” Madden said. “I just tried to go in being empathetic and kind to myself.”
James said dealing with intense subjects in the film still had a cost. For Francis, that included binge eating, even with a spit bucket.
“We had to treat the eating scenes like stunts,” James said. “It’s really taxing, even if you’re spitting food out, you’re still absorbing stuff. She did an incredible job powering through.”
Powering through, Francis credited prop master Kim Ritchie with holding her spit bucket. Francis would expel the food after each take.
“The person who ended up holding it the most was our propmaster, Kim,” Francis said. “I don’t know what I would have done without her or that spit bucket.”
James invented some elements of weight loss culture. Hana scrolls through “The Potato Masher Challenge” on social media where dieting women squeeze their arm through a potato masher.
Viewers will find no such viral challenge online, but James said it has caused many viewers to Google it.
“That’s the absurdity of diet culture, wellness culture,” James said.
Francis, Madden and Macdonald were all surprised to learn the potato masher challenge was fictional.
“I thought that was real because that’s how society is,” Macdonald said.
The pills do cause the side effect of sleep eating, which is a real phenomenon in which people eat while unconscious and wake up with no memory. Saccharine escalates sleep eating to Hana awakening to a pile of wrappers and spilled food on the floor.
“You wake up and your subconscious, your unconscious, has made decisions on your own behalf, I think that is probably a horrifying experience,” Francis said, adding that the Saccharine exaggeration “fit in well with where Hana was at in her journey in the movie.”
James added that the sleep eating could also be viewed as a side effect of the cadaver ash.
“The intention behind it was the idea that something is taking control to the point of possession,” James said. “The horror derives from that.”
