Aarcflick

 How far would you go just to finally feel at ease within your own body? That is exactly where *Saccharine* begins for me, and it is also where the film demonstrates its greatest strength—not merely as a work of body horror, but as a piece that transforms shame, self-image, and that urge to remake oneself into something far more repulsive. What I appreciated about it is that the film doesn't simply present diet culture and the obsession with beauty as mere themes for the viewer to observe; it truly renders them physical. It turns them into something that takes root inside you, that gets under your skin, and that—at a certain point—ceases to feel like a matter of control, becoming instead something that has completely spiraled out of it. It is precisely for this reason that the similarities to *The Substance* struck me as so effective: that sensation that your own body is no longer the vessel you inhabit, but rather something against which you must wage a ceaseless battle. Director:...