Body horror, concrete and a deceptively devastating nature doc – reviewed.
Saccharine
With the Ozempic era in full force and celebrities wasting away before our very eyes, I was hugely excited about Saccharine, a new body horror taking aim at our toxic weight-loss culture and the endless pursuit of smallness. Directed and written by Australian horror savant Natalie Erika James (Relic), Saccharine joins a proud tradition of The Substance, Grafted, Shell and other such campy, beauty-at-a-price explorations of The Shit Women Go Through.
It follows a Hana (Midori Francis), a medical student prone to junk food binges who is also hellbent on losing weight, which may or may not have something to do with the willowy gym instructor that keeps catching her eye. But after meeting up with an old friend who has undergone a dramatic body transformation, Hana finds a quicker solution than stair-climbs: a mysterious pill called “The Grey” which sheds mega-pounds within a matter of days.
But as in all these films, and indeed often in real life, this magic bullet medicine always comes at a price. Without giving too much away, the macabre origins of “The Grey” unlock a tormented spirit which unleashes hell on Hana. Despite her never looking better, her life soon becomes a living nightmare of blackouts and hauntings, all while she takes to increasingly dramatic measures to keep her weight loss tracking downwards in her bullet-journal.
There are oodles of stomach-turning special effects, but I was ultimately left a little confused about what Saccharine was actually trying to say. While the social media sequences effectively capture our modern hellscape (I had to Google whether the fictional “potato masher challenge” was real or not), there’s also a strange subplot about Hana’s morbidly obese, housebound father which felt cruel and unnecessary. A lot to chew over, but ultimately left me hungry. / Alex Casey
The History of Concrete
At various points during John Wilson’s debut feature documentary I wondered: is anyone here because they were interested to learn about the history of concrete? From the gentle chuckles elicited by Wilson’s signature visual puns and inspired juxtapositions it seemed most were familiar with or at least aware of his HBO series How To with John Wilson. But you never know with film fest audiences.
If anybody was there purely for the concrete this was probably the flop of the fest. But as a Wilson admirer hoping to enjoy a feature-length bonus episode of his TV show it was everything I could have hoped for, though also maybe proof that you can have too much of a good thing.
Basically the video diary of an out-of-work filmmaker, it starts with him attending a Hallmark movie workshop during the writers’ strike and then attempting to use the lessons to make and sell the very documentary we’re watching. There are, of course, endless diversions – some funny, some bleak, often both, like when he’s randomly invited to attend a ceremony where Kim Kardashian is awarded GQ’s Man of the Year.
I could watch John Wilson wander into weird situations with weird people for hours, but ultimately The History of Concrete convinced me the 25-minute episode is probably the ideal format for his style of video essay. If you haven’t seen How To yet, you should definitely start there. / Calum Henderson
Nuisance Bear
The joke is on me for booking this film based on the image and title alone, fully expecting a light-hearted Bears Do the Darnedest Things-style romp. Filmed in the icy tundra town of Churchill in Canada, the documentary untangles a much more complicated and profoundly devastating situation, as the desperate, hungry polar bears in the area encroach further into the community against a backdrop of colonisation and climate catastrophe.
There are so many surreal, beautiful images throughout Nuisance Bear that sum up the bizarre, precarious situation locals have found themselves in, from the buses of hokey tourists pretending to be Caribou with their arms in the air, to a tranquilised polar bear with a Survivor buff over his eyes, soaring through the skies as he is choppered to his new remote home. There’s even bear dream sequences imagining life under the rapidly-decreasing sea ice.
Anchored by Inuit narrator Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons, the documentary grounds itself in indigenous knowledge which only further highlights how fractured the modern relationship with nature has become, and just how quickly it has broken down. While there are a few cherished moments of cute bears, the film is largely an indictment on humanity, and an urgent reminder of what is really at stake. As Gibbons says himself: this is not about the bears, this is about us. / AC
More NZIFF 2026 reviews:
Discussion about this post