By Lucy Spicer

“This one obscure weight loss trick helps shed pounds instantly!” You’ve probably seen ad copy like this floating around on a webpage, maybe accompanied by a badly rendered before-and-after image. We know these ads are scams. But in writer-director Natalie Erika James’ Saccharine, our protagonist discovers a real, extremely effective weight loss shortcut. The consequences are gruesome.  

“This film has come from a personal place, but it’s really shaped by a culture that we all live in,” says James (Relic, 2020 Sundance Film Festival) as she introduces the audience at The Ray Theatre in Park City to her newest project. “And that culture is one that often teaches us to be at war with our bodies.”

From the first moments of James’ new body horror film, it’s clear that Hana (Midori Francis) is fighting a constant battle with her weight. Bombarded by social media messaging from both body positivity advocates and fitness influencers, Hana is caught in a cycle of binge-eating and punishing herself for it — and it doesn’t help that she’s infatuated with an instructor at the gym named Alanya (Madeleine Madden). When she runs into an old acquaintance at a bar, the newly thin woman shares her weight loss secret: a mysterious pill that Hana reverse-engineers only to discover that it mostly contains human ash. The pill is too pricey for Hana’s budget, but as a medical student she does have access to human remains.

She swipes some bones from a cadaver her class is studying (a woman that one of her classmates had dubbed “Big Bertha”) and makes her own pills. And boy, do they work. Hana starts losing weight rapidly regardless of what she eats. Soon she has the figure she’s always coveted, but the pills have some distressing side effects — including the appearance of Big Bertha’s image in convex reflective surfaces. The more weight Hana loses, the stronger Bertha’s presence grows, eventually becoming a physical threat to Hana and those around her.

“The starting point was this sense that when you’re in the grips of disordered eating, there’s something outside of your control,” explains the writer-director at the Q&A after Saccharine’s January 22 premiere as part of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival’s Midnight section. “Sometimes that can kind of feel like something else is driving that. I knew I wanted to create a specter within that storyline.” So think The Picture of Dorian Gray, “but instead of the painting, it’s human ash that links Hana spiritually to the ghost,” she says.

Saccharine is a visceral cinematic experience, made all the more frightening by the fact that Hana displays a deeply human, conflicting balance of intelligence and desperation. “A big part of creating this character was that you do relate to her, you do understand her, she is a real person,” says Francis during the Q&A. “And yet, that part that hates herself, that part that is destructive is truly dangerous. Playing around with that danger was a big part of creating Hana.”

Granted, most of us wouldn’t resort to cremation cuisine to feel more attractive, but a pill — or injection — that can guarantee weight loss? Like Bertha’s ghost, that’s an industry growing stronger by the day. 

“When I first spoke with Nat, obviously we were talking about how fitness and social influences play such a big role in our society and what we ingest and how that is such a massive market,” adds Madden. “I think, for me, it definitely brought up questions about my own attitudes that I have to body image.”