Interview: Natalie Erika James, Midori Francis, Danielle Macdonald & Madeleine Madden on ‘Saccharine’
It’s been six years since Natalie Erika James first unsettled audiences with Relic, her hauntingly assured 2020 feature debut about dementia, grief, and the slow horror of watching a loved one disappear. With her third feature Saccharine, the filmmaker proves that her gift for excavating the body’s deepest anxieties was no fluke. A deliciously disturbing, viscerally unnerving supernatural body-horror film that had its world premiere in the Midnight section of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, Saccharine takes one of the most pervasive and insidious aspects of modern culture — diet culture, body shame, and the relentless pressure placed on women’s bodies — and refracts it through the lens of the grotesque, conjuring a film that is as thoughtful and empathetic as it is squirm-inducing.
Saccharine centers on Hana (Midori Francis), a lovelorn, overworked medical student who, after analyzing the compound of an expensive diet pill and discovering its main ingredient is human ash, begins manufacturing her own version using her school’s cadaver. The pills work — but they come at a terrible cost, as Hana soon finds herself tormented by the vengeful, insatiable ghost of the very person she’s ingesting. As the supernatural force tightens its grip, Hana is pulled further and further from the people who love her, including her fiercely loyal best friend Josie (Danielle Macdonald) and Alanya (Madeleine Madden), a personal trainer who becomes both an object of Hana’s desire and a mirror she measures herself against.
For James, who both wrote and directed the film, the body horror genre was the only language capable of capturing something as intimate and internal as an eating disorder. “I obviously have a love of horror, so I think my brain just naturally goes there, but I do think in this particular story the feeling of being in the grips of something like an eating disorder, it can also often feel like it’s both inside of you, but there’s something external to you that’s taking control,” she explains. “And so that sense of like a dark presence or dark passenger was something that I tried to capture in the figure of the ghost. So it kind of felt like the perfect vehicle. I think horror lets you externalize what’s internal in a really effective way, and it lets you take bigger swings with your imagery, and particularly for something that’s so much about the body and the feeling within your own body, it felt like to lean into the body horror of it all would be the right path.”
That tension between the internal and the external sits at the very heart of Francis’ layered, deeply felt performance as Hana, a character who understands the human body scientifically but is unable to look at her own with that same clarity. It was a contradiction that James was drawn to from the start, and one that fundamentally shaped how Francis approached the role. “Nat had told me early on that she was curious about the protagonist in a horror film who’s a female, who’s not constantly just scared as the only default, but who might also be intrigued by what’s going on, who might try and figure it out,” recalls Francis.
“What I like about it being Hana at the center of this is that there is a rational part of all of our brains, and there’s a misconception with eating disorders, with addictions, with anything that’s happening in the mind, that it is maybe a superficial issue, a lack of awareness or a lack of depth,” she continues. “But actually you see this person who is completely rational still struggling so much with this thing, and as much as she wants to wrap her head around it, she actually can’t, because this is something so much greater than anything that can be understood in numbers.”
If Hana’s mind is the film’s battleground, then her friendship with Josie is one of its few sources of warmth and light. As Hana’s devoted best friend, Macdonald imbues Josie with an easy, lived-in compassion, a woman who has weathered her own struggles and reached a place of self-acceptance, and who wants nothing more than for her friend to find the same. But as Macdonald is quick to point out, love and compassion aren’t always enough to save someone from the depths of their own shame. “When you love and care about someone, you want to help them in any way,” she says. “Josie had already gone through her own issues and gotten a hold of them and figured out who she is and self-acceptance, and she just wants that for her friend. But the hard thing is, we all go on our own journey, we all find our own way, and occasionally Josie can be a little strong with it. It makes Hana withdraw a little, because she doesn’t really want to be seen, and Josie can see her at that moment. And that’s a really tough place to be in, especially as a friend.”
It’s that very intelligence of the character, Macdonald notes, that makes Hana’s spiral all the more devastating to witness. “That’s the interesting, complex thing about this. You do have a really intelligent character that knows they’re actively hurting themselves and doesn’t quite know how to stop,” she says. “It’s not always just about information. Addiction and struggles go much, much deeper than that. With Josie, she’s kind of just there, waiting to help her, and even when everything’s crazy at the end and things seem insane and impossible, she’s like, ‘Okay, what are we doing?'” That authenticity, both Macdonald and James agree, was hard-won through genuine off-screen chemistry. “I feel like you guys went away before we started shooting,” James says of Macdonald and Francis, who quickly forged a real-life kinship. “We came back and we had been best friends for like 10 years,” Macdonald laughs.
Rounding out the central trio is Madden as Alanya, a personal trainer who becomes both the focus of Hana’s longing and a figure she compulsively compares herself against. For Madden, the key to the character lay in the gap between who Alanya actually is and what Hana projects onto her. “When I first read the script, I really noticed that as Hana is on her progression towards dramatically losing weight, I interpreted that in her mind she’s going, ‘Okay, I’m becoming more valuable and becoming more lovable and becoming more appealing to people,’ and specifically to Alanya,” she explains. “But as that is happening, parallel to that, Alanya is sort of growing more concerned and maybe disturbed at the methods that Hana is going about achieving this.”
What ultimately drew Madden to the character, however, was the genuine empathy buried beneath Alanya’s seemingly idealized surface. “Alanya at times can be perceived as this object of obsession and desire,” she says, “but what I really loved about Alanya was just that there was genuine concern and empathy found in her at the core of this.” It’s a role that resonated with Madden’s own reckoning with fitness and wellness culture, and the often punishing standards it imposes. “We’ve seen that a lot in our culture, in fitness and wellness culture, and how that can be an insane amount of pressure that we place on not only ourselves, but particularly on women’s bodies, and dissecting women’s bodies,” she reflects. “I certainly had my own experience with, ‘Okay, what does being fit and healthy mean to me?’ making this film. The way it provokes thought and your own self-reflection on your own body and self-image — that’s something that I was really making sure to check myself with as we were shooting.”
For James, Alanya’s arc represents one of the film’s quietest tragedies — a missed chance at genuine connection, snatched away by the very pressures the film interrogates. “Alanya really offers Hana a chance at a real, authentic, truthful connection, and that’s what we see towards the end there. And unfortunately, at that time she’s just unable to stand the pressure of being seen,” she says. “So it’s a real tragedy that there could have been something truthful and honest there, but it’s snatched away in the most brutal way.”
Arriving as it does in an age of weight-loss drugs and a resurgent wave of weight-loss influencers, Saccharine feels strikingly, almost eerily current — yet James is careful to stress that the film is no simple polemic. Rather than offer a binary critique, she was interested in tracing the way diet culture burrows into an individual psyche, marrying that contemporary anxiety to something older and stranger: the mythology of the hungry ghost. “The film coming out at this time has been kind of an incredible coincidence, because the project was in motion and very much lodged in my brain for years before writing it,” she explains. “But I do think it points to just how insidious and embedded into culture diet culture is, and weight stigma and fat phobia is. The pendulum does swing in terms of people’s reaction to it and how the messaging is conveyed, but it’s still in the collective psyche to a certain degree.”
“It’s definitely not a critique of weight-loss drugs in any way,” she clarifies. “It’s more about the culture of value that we place on people, and how to move beyond that, and how to question our own preconceived beliefs about that. There’s that element of not trying to be too binary or black and white about how we should all approach things, because it is an individual journey. It’s more just about being aware of the things that sit within our culture.”
It’s a theme the hungry ghost crystallizes perfectly, embodying an insatiable hunger that can never truly be satisfied. “It being this insatiable desire that tortures you and can never be sated,” says Francis of the mythology, “it isn’t about whether you take the weight loss. It’s about the idea that losing that amount, or that number, or getting to this point is going to satiate that bottomless pit. And as we see with Hana, it doesn’t.” It’s an idea that Madden sees as the engine of Hana’s undoing. “The idea that all of your problems will be fixed and your life will be so much better, and you will be successful or beloved by everyone,” she says. “She tragically tortures a lot of her relationships in the pursuit for that goal.”
For Francis, the film’s ultimate insight is that the answer was never external at all. “Looking at any kind of compulsion, addiction, obsession, there is a tendency to rationalize, to isolate, to look at the numbers. It’s a problem that we think we can overthink or think our way out of, especially if we think we’re smart, but actually it makes it worse, because the more we get into that internal no man’s land of just overthinking and isolating, the further we get away from connection in life,” she says. “If Hana had maybe turned to Josie, who’s actually a real-life person sitting there, maybe her problems could have been solved. But instead, she thinks that she can outsmart them alone with her brain.” As James puts it, in the end, it all comes back to control. “It’s about control, trying to control her life and looking for safety in a way.”
A potent, unflinching, and gruesomely imaginative third feature, Saccharine cements Natalie Erika James‘s status as one of the most exciting and singular voices working in horror today, an artist unafraid to mine the genre’s nastiest corners in service of something deeply, achingly human. It’ll be fascinating to see what she sinks her teeth into next.
Saccharine is now playing in theaters.