Saccharine / Eat. Pray. Lose.

Medical student Hana eats deliciously, dissects corpses, and occasionally masturbates. In short, she's living her best life. She also casts longing glances at her fitness instructor Alanya, but doesn't dare go beyond glances—Alanya is too hot and toned, and Hana loves jam donuts too much. If only she could lose twenty kilos, then...

One day at a bar, Hana runs into her former classmate Melissa, who has noticeably slimmed down. Melissa immediately spills all the cheat codes—it's all thanks to a new miracle drug—and even shares a wonder capsule with her friend. The friend, however, pops the capsule not under her tongue but into an analyzer (she's a med student, remember?) and makes a killer discovery: the drug's base is ash from dead people. Hana literally snips a few bones from a half-dissected corpse, tosses them into the cremation furnace, and the generic is ready. Fresh out of the oven, pardon the pun.

No, this isn't a spoiler: the twist about human ashes is spilled by the film's distributors right in the synopsis with the composure of a pathologist. Also the "plot twist" about Hana being haunted by the spirit of the woman she's slowly eating.

The reader expects the rhyme "The Substance," and rightly so. "Saccharine" (sorry, but writing the Russian localized title again is beyond me) in its message inherits Coralie Fargeat's loud body horror: both heroines have a body that the world considers defective, and a miraculous remedy promising to fix that defect. The only differences are in the side effects: one gets the best version of herself crawling out of her back, the other gets a hungry ghost in her kitchen. The Ministry of Health, as usual, didn't warn.

"Saccharine" initially seems even more subtle and intimate. It's not body horror, it's more like food horror—the eating of buns is filmed with such juicy hatred, such shame and self-disgust from Hana, that you welcome the cutaways to close-ups of necrotic organs as a relief.

But then the paths diverge. "The Substance" spoke about ageism, misogyny, the beauty industry, and show business that first turns a woman into a commodity and then writes her off as expired. "Saccharine" seems to be about to similarly take on diet culture, fatphobia, and Ozempic, but at some point it drops all that and veers into an ordinary story about a vengeful spirit. The complex conversation about hunger, shame, and self-hatred is displaced by a moral about not eating the ashes of strangers, lest their ghosts take offense. A useful tip, of course, but we kind of already knew that.

Mom, can we have "The Substance"? - We have "The Substance" at home. Judging by the sounds from the kitchen, it's eating someone again.

#watched_a_movie