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Saccharine is felt by the stomach. Torn between eating too much and exercising, first-year student Hana Hitching (Midori Francis) figures out how to lose her ideal weight. For a man whose appearance appears to have been extended – a brief photo shows the cookbooks hidden in his cupboard – the quick fix seems irresistible. Hana begins taking illegal drugs that ensure her weight “melts off”. The secret to making it? Human ashes.
Soon he begins to be disturbed by the ghostly presence of a woman whose last corpse he cremated. “It’s important, isn’t it?” says a former overweight friend, who once took the same pills and experienced the anxiety that followed and voice comparisons, in places that included harsh words in the middle of the food culture: nothing tastes like skin tone.
Like the female protagonists of writer-director Natalie Erika James’s two previous films, Relic and Apartment 7A, Hana is struggling to control her body. The organization becomes more violent as it forces him to eat more, often even in his sleep – and the more he does, the more powerful this magical tormentor becomes. It didn’t take long for Hana to lose a lot of weight but not until she stopped denying that she was changing for the better.
The dangers of binge eating are highlighted in Maddie’s Secret, in which foodie Maddie Ralph (John Early) is hospitalized for a cardiac arrest and later a stomach rupture after work-related complications that cause her bulimia to recur, trapping her in a vicious circle and a hunt. Threats to her life appear but Maddie holds on. It is the death of your partner in such circumstances that divorces him, but he divorces her.
The closure of the food being closed, or stuffed into the mouth, is repeated in Saccharine and Maddie’s Secret. The protagonists, both shy and self-centered, turn to food as a way to cope with anxiety and have jobs that support their disorder. Although one is a spiritual horror film and the other is a comedy, both evoke the anxieties of old age but are enhanced by modern techniques.
Hana’s Saccharine Clocks then tests the mashed potato challenge online, in which users measure the weight of their arms by trying to stuff it into a narrow kitchen utensil. If this sounds silly, it can’t be. Remember the problem with last year’s viral TikTok sunglasses, designed to show off waists small enough for sunglasses to fit around. While Hana’s father is fat, her thin mother matches what people see Almond mother – a quote from the 2013 episode of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, which was also popular on TikTok ten years later, describing a woman who not only follows what she eats but also forces it on her children. Hannah’s mother bakes her daughter sugar-free, butter-free bread and without flour.
Maddie’s Secret was inspired by the “ugliest and sexiest” foods that Early – who also wrote and directed the film – told IndieWire that its algorithm began to recommend. Ozempic was mentioned. At the inpatient facility, Maddie later admitted, patients’ phones are confiscated to prevent them from being exposed to potentially dangerous things on the internet. Indeed, when surfing the employee’s phone, they gather to watch a video of mukbang (or “eating”) characterized by the amount of food consumed.
Although movies about eating disorders began with the made-for-TV movie The Best Little Girl in the World (1981), Saccharine and Maddie’s Secret were released less than a year later.less and less girl summer” – fueled by the proliferation of weight loss drugs – and it is an inevitable addition to 2024 films about women who are forced to correct and then “fix” their perceived mistakes. Take the body horror films The Substance and Shell, in which female actors were separated from the aging industry in order to find difficult medical treatment.
From period films to futuristic dystopias, concerns about physical weakness have not changed in the last few years. If the female protagonist of 2024’s Uglies wants to follow the path of government control that will please her, that of 2025’s The Ugly Stepsister is subjected to brutal, old-fashioned surgeries, including a “nose job” performed with a hammer and chisel. The weight loss remedy recommended by the wisecracking teacher in this Cinderella concept is really hard to swallow – it involves swallowing a tapeworm.
Saccharine mother figures and Maddie’s secret are not bad stepmothers, as in the film, but they carry our protagonists with the pain they inherited, which increases their unhealthy relationship with food. Hana’s desires reflect her need for certainty – after growing up dangerously, she doubts that she is the adult that her mother, who likes to comment on her face and body, has always wanted her to be. And while Maddie has the family support system Hana doesn’t — the man she loves the most — the disordered eating habits she’s relapsed into were instilled in her as a child. Not only did he start because of his mother’s bite, but he got them inside him so much that the frustration on his face was the same as what he had been told before.
Even outside of the family, bodies are illuminated, size is important in conversation and hurtful words are inevitable. Hannah’s fellow students mock the fat cadaver she’s supposed to mess with, and cruel online comments about Maddie’s appearance accompany her first brush with virality. For someone struggling with physical issues, however, even well-intentioned compliments can feel like they don’t exist. Explaining her struggles with an eating disorder, the new hire tells Maddie how refreshing it is to see a foodie with a “healthy” body, “like not too skinny”.
Not being able to feel at home in your own body is a deeply isolating experience, which is illuminated through the characters losing important connections either by pushing away the people they care about or feeling sorry for themselves. For all its messages about the body, Saccharine succumbs to its own version of the “other”: the fat woman is turned into a bad person and a repulsive object in death, even though she is remembered as kind and caring in life. Maddie’s Secret, on the other hand, shows genuine compassion for its protagonist at all times, giving him the acceptance he strives to show himself.
