{Overlook Film Festival 2026} Saccharine (2026) Is the Body Horror Film That Ozempic Culture Deserves

There’s a moment early in Saccharine where Midori Francis, playing a lovelorn medical student named Hana, looks at food the way most of us have looked at food at some point, with a mixture of desperate want and quiet shame. Natalie Erika James, the Australian director who made Relic one of the most quietly devastating horror films of the last decade, knows exactly what she’s doing with that look. It is also not the first time in this film that the connection between that want and shame seems to make connections to the queer elements of the film. The more I think about the movie the more those elements feel central to the storytelling and may also be limited by my own perspective and privilege.

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As someone currently on a GLP-1, the cultural timing of this film is not lost on me. We are living through a moment where pharmaceutical companies are essentially selling the absence of desire, and the horror premise of Saccharine (***VERY LIGHT SPOILERS FOR BASIC PLOT***a medical student eats human ashes as a weight loss fix and gets haunted by the ghost of whoever she’s consuming) lands with a specificity that feels almost too on the nose. If the movie didn’t have a genuine comedy to it it might be too overwhelming. That being said Saccharine is not overserious. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and more important its the opposite of its titular sweetner. Touching without being overpowering.

The monster work here is pretty remarkable. We are absolutely terrified of the creature we encounter but at no moment did I feel like the movie was poking fun at its size or how it looked. The night terror sequence in the first act is the film’s clearest statement of intent, and it’s great. There is a slam cut sequence used periodically to move us into and out of black out sequences that is so sharp. The eye imagery is genuinely unsettling in that particular way where you can’t quite explain why it’s working on you, only that it is.

James is operating in that Babadook lineage of Australian horror where the monster is always a metaphor and the metaphor is always personal, and she’s doing it with remarkable physical transformation on screen and a lead performance from Francis that deserves real attention when this thing hits Shudder later this year.

The conceit, at its core, is that we are all haunted by past versions of ourselves. Especially if those versions were fat. That’s not a comfortable sentence to write, and Saccharine doesn’t let you sit comfortably with it either. As someone who has struggled with being overweight for much of their adult life and suddenly isn’t, the siren song of the fridge and the pantry hits all too close to home. That late night snack just hits differently.

Where the film wobbles is in its parent plot, which feels underdeveloped in ways that kept pulling me out. Now, I’ll say this with the caveat that James is almost certainly operating on a queer thematic register here that I, a cis straight white guy, am probably not the best equipped to fully decode. There’s something happening in the relational dynamics between Hana, her mother (Danielle Macdonald), and her father that feels complex and difficult but never fully explored. When you throw that into the the mix with her entanglement with Madeleine Madden’s character that I suspect lands differently if you’re bringing more personal context to it.

What I can say is that the connective tissue between the family material and the ghost mechanics felt soft to me, and the film’s third act introduces some rules it doesn’t fully commit to, particularly in a finale that takes a couple of swings before it lands. The ending, when it finally arrives, breaks its own logic a little, and it’s the one moment where James seemed less than fully confident. That said, where it lands thematically, specifically the idea that the food noise never actually goes away, is exactly right. It’s a haunting that doesn’t resolve. It just becomes yours.

Saccharine is the kind of film that works better as a puzzle than a gut punch. But it is only once we stop trying to solve that puzzle that the film finally reveals itself. Midori Francis is phenomenal and the movie feels so much more accesible when you just let her wreck you a little. You’ll be fine. If not there are always donuts to make us feel better.

I caught Saccharine as part of The Overlook Film Festival 2026. If you haven’t checked it out. You absolutely should.