Hana is hungry for change. A first-year medical student caught between binge eating, shame and an aching obsession with her magnetic gym trainer Alanya, she becomes fixated on the promise of a thinner, more desirable body. When a miracle weight-loss pill begins delivering astonishing results, Hana is willing to overlook one disturbing detail: it contains human ashes.

Soon, she is making her own—using the very bodies she studies in anatomy class.

As her body shrinks, something else begins to grow around her: a hungry ghost, born from insatiable desire and becoming more powerful with every kilo she loses. What begins as transformation turns feverish and uncanny, blurring appetite, attraction and self-destruction into something increasingly impossible to control.

Saccharine is a darkly seductive body-horror nightmare about the violence of wanting to become someone else—and the hunger that remains when “enough” is never enough.

Natalie Erika James is a Melbourne-based writer and director known for psychologically charged horror that transforms intimate fears into the supernatural. Her acclaimed feature debut, Relic (2020), explored dementia and family trauma through a haunting supernatural lens, followed by Apartment 7A (2024), a psychological horror prequel to Rosemary’s Baby.

Her third feature, Saccharine (2026), continues her fascination with the body, identity and inherited fears, drawing on the Buddhist folklore of the “hungry ghost” to explore body dysmorphia, disordered eating and insatiable desire. James wrote, directed and produced the film.