It can look as if Hana (Midori Francis) is running through an M.C. Escher maze on her daily workout in “Saccharine,” unsure she’s moving forwards or backwards on undulating stairwells that offer no hint as if she’s headed in the right direction. She has recently joined a gym in part to shed some extra pounds, but it doesn’t hurt that the sales pitch comes from an attractive instructor named Alanya (Madeleine Madden), for whom she wants to lose the weight for reasons besides her own health, and if anyone was going to know how unhealthy her eating habits are, it should be her as she attends med school, not only reading up on the effects of obesity, but seeing the end results first-hand as she dissects cadavers, including one that comes to be lovingly nicknamed Bertha. However, in Natalie Erika James’ crackerjack chiller, Hana worries she may have taken things a step too far when an old friend shows up dramatically thinner than she was back in high school, crediting a new magical pill with seemingly no side effects.
Of course, that might be misleading when James, who previously made such a splash with her debut “Relic” that turned the twisted nature of slowly losing a loved one to dementia into a taut horror film, has a way of showing there’s never an easy way out of crises of confidence and finds just the right weight for a moving tale of a young woman looking for hers as she contends with threats from outside herself and within. While Hana swears she can see a reanimated Bertha starting to stalk her in convex reflections from such items as spoons and glasses after starting to take the pills, much to the concern of her fellow med student Josie (Danielle Macdonald), James sees an even more formidable enemy that’s completely invisible to her in the pressure she feels to conform to a certain body type, raised by parents of completely different physical builds and drawn towards food for comfort more than sustenance as she wonders what exactly is her fit is in the world. Although Francis’ performance may be the film’s most impressive special effect, convincingly relaying the experience of someone who feels trapped in her own skin from her eyes alone, James marries a variety of techniques for a good old fashioned monster movie that comes across fresh due to the inspired way the director envisions a battle with an eating disorder and reasserts her place as a visual stylist of the first order, always making the unexpected choice to turn the stomach into knots.
After midnight screenings of “Saccharine” kept people up until the next morning and then some at Sundance, the film is now opening up across the country and James graciously took the time to talk about her lead actor’s marvelous performance, how she went about creating another memorable character in Bertha and the personal origins of the story.
I actually want to start with this amazing end credits sequence where you make a variety of everyday items look completely gross. When you make a movie like this, do you just start seeing the world in a different way?
Yeah, I guess you’re constantly looking for the potential of certain food and how it films on screen. In a way with the end sequence, we were looking for food and and trying to capture food in a way that really was in line with that idea of saccharine because the film’s title denotes something sweet but the sense of rot underneath and the sickliness of it. So in making those end titles, I was actively looking for things that captured that feeling. Condensed milk turns out to be the perfect encapsulation of that feeling.
[In general] we really wanted to lean into the the dopamine hit of a sugar rush and show that feeling through color as well. If you think of artificial colors in in candy, we really wanted to push that that visual, so my cinematographer, my production designer and I talked a lot about like candy and grime being the two things that we tried to infuse into the image.I understand it has some personal roots, but how did this develop as an idea for a film?
It definitely has a a personal connection for me. My parents were really on opposite ends of the spectrum when it came to how they related to food and their bodies, so a lot of messaging in my childhood I was trying to unpack through this film. But at the same time, I was taken with the idea of not just literal hunger but also spiritual or romantic hunger or a yearning for something beyond yourself. That’s how the character of Hana really came about.
What sold you on Midori to play her?
She’s so wonderful. I had seen her in a few horrors, one of which my friend directed, so I knew of her, but I was really just impressed by how she’s so disarmingly authentic in everything she does, whether that’s comedy or psychological horror. I knew that we needed someone with that quality to bring the audience along for the ride with Hana because she’s a character who does very questionable things and is working through so much shame in herself and I think you can’t help but root for someone like Midori and the Hana that she presents.
She has makeup on in the film that is gradually shed to reflect the weight she loses and I realize this might be better to ask of her, but as a director, do you think about what effect that has on the performance – not just in an aesthetic sense but the feeling of it?
Yeah, there’s so much that goes into performing the transformation that Hana goes through physically. Prosthetics and makeup was a big part of that. We really tried to go for something that was as subtle and seamless as possible, and [with the] prosthetics themselves we tried to avoid anywhere where [Midori’s] expressive lines were so that she would come through in every frame. But there’s also the physicality of how she carries herself and the certain kind of bodysuit-like prosthetics that she has on as well. That’s a testament to Midori’s skill that you can see as the film progresses and she gets more gaunt that self-consciousness that she has at the start begins to wear away. A lot of that is to do with the escalating horror as well, but I think Midori’s just an incredible physical performer and it’s the two things that come together to create that.
The effects in general really are seamless, and I’m assuming it was a mix of practical and visual effects. Has it been interesting to find the right balance for the two so you can push yourself creatively on the set?
Yeah, definitely. With this film, it was really important to us that it felt very textural and that you feel not just the food and the visceral eating, but also the cadavers and the body that you’re actually from a sensory level feeling that visually and aurally. We definitely leaned into practical effects and augmenting or enhancing with visual effects, but it’s such a credit to our prosthetics designer [Larry Van Duynhoven] who had a mammoth task of not just doing the cadavers Bertha and Grace and all of the stages that she goes through, but Midori as well. He definitely had his work cut out for him, but I think that texture is what gives you a bodily reaction because it feels so visceral.
Were there actually multiple Berthas? Without spoiling anything, Bertha serves a lot of different purposes in this.
Yeah, there were actually two actors who played her and we had four stages that we designed for Bertha or Grace, so we had a different look because the idea is that she grows in the film as Hana gets smaller and there’s a distorted view of of Bertha that emerges as this hungry ghost and it’s all seen through Hana’s lens. So she becomes more more monstrous only because she kind of of what she, you know, represents for Hana.
And we wanted [the creature] to sit within both realities. You don’t want it to just be pure metaphor. You also want there to be an internal logic to the design as well. For Bertha in particular, you know, we were really drawing on this notion of the hungry ghost and a lot of the time those figures are almost described as if the the person is stripped away and what’s left is an insatiable hunger or drive, so we definitely had this relentlessness that we tried to capture in the design of Bertha, as if a lot of her humanity had been stripped away.
Just as a source of visual intrigue, the idea that Bertha can only be seen in convex objects is a real stroke of genius. How did it come about and did it make things more difficult to pull off?
The short answer is yes. It did add a lot of time and difficulty to the shoot, but they’re always workarounds and in terms of the idea behind it, as you you can probably gather, [the film is] so much about how you often perceive yourself in this warped way and how body dysmorphia manifests. Particularly for a character like Hana, that just felt like the perfect visual format to to represent that.
The locations in the film are phenomenal too in terms of how twisty they can get, in particular about the gym steps that curled up. Did you have places in mind or were they scouting finds?
Yeah, it was actually such a joy being able to shoot across two universities in Melbourne. The University of Melbourne is one that I went to and my sister went to the architectural school and that’s the architectural library. It wasn’t something that I had in mind when I wrote it, but I feel like the hamster wheel feeling of it was something that was perfect for the relentlessness of trying to improve yourself and the cyclical nature of that in or the feeling of being stuck.
It was perfect. What’s it been like to put the film out there? From other interviews, it seems like the reaction may have put this into perspective when you spend so much time in editing watching it that you might become numb to it.
To be honest, I’ve only seen it once with an audience, and probably that will be my last as well. I’m definitely one of those directors who’s hyperaware of what everyone’s doing in the audience. At our Sundance screening, some people left during some of the dissection [scenes], and you kind of panic [thinking], “Oh shit, like do people hate it?” And then it turns out someone had passed out. So it always is a joy to see what lands, but I think there’s a cost to being in the room and getting that feedback in real time as well.
“Saccharine” opens in theaters on May 22nd.