Director: Natalie Erika James
Year: 2026
Country: Australia/Finland
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Body-Horror; Supernatural
Plot:
Trying to get her crush’s attention, a woman undergoes a special diet regimen to help lose the weight she’s been struggling with her entire life, which is the underlying reason for her predicament, but when the true cause of the situation is known, she finds herself stalked by a deadly being.
Review:
Overall, this is a bit troubling for what it is. What makes this work the best is the main setup in here, which is quite intriguing and manages to offer a strong starting point to offer something unique and immersive. The whole idea of her being at odds with her body and unwilling to go through the necessary steps to get into shape to make her gym-teacher crush notice her and feel that a crazy, radical diet plan is the way to go about that instead is a strong enough way to sell what’s going on here involving her self-loathing style and desperation for acceptance. The small subtleties involved in helping to sell this, from her constant binge-eating whenever things don’t go her way, the constant harping from her mother to lose weight, and the contrast between them where she’s slightly heavier than her rail-thin mother but less than her morbidly obese father, all manage to help focus the story on body positivity, diet culture, and the dangers of influencer culture trying to help sell the latest craze to make people feel comfortable in their bodies.
However, that also highlights some of the main issues here where it tries to tell this kind of story in a really lackluster manner. Most of this is due to a rather innate inability to dive deeper into the story than it should, making the idea come together nicely even though there's not much else going on. While it does a good job highlighting these various issues and aspects of the community at large, there's not much here on who the main producers of the drug are and why they're producing this sort of drug. This never dives deep into the corporate side of things involving why everything comes together like this in the first place, and everything about this is simply surface-level gloss that never comes close to offering any kind of meaningful inclusion beyond that point. That's on top of some of the other big storyline illogicalities, going from how the treatment itself actually works to the convenient nature of how she's able to re-create the costly drug itself using the same equipment from a medical lab. That's the big issue here, as this is wholly unbelievable and strains way too much credibility to try to make the plot move.
The other big drawback to the film is that the pacing and tempo are so sluggish and bland that it's hard to get involved in the story all that much. Far too much time is spent trying to deal with these various subplots and eccentricities of the storyline that it doesn't have much room for the supernatural spirit following her to do much beyond follow a routine series of hauntings where she shows up suddenly in a glass surface only to disappear when she tries to see it. This is repeated frequently enough that it becomes quite repetitive trying to go through the same motions, and with the rest of the film devoted to these outside factors trying to bring the central setup together, it is overlong and struggles to maintain the need to be that long. The last real factor here is the finale, which tries to go for the over-the-top gorefest ending but is ruined by some central illogical moments, some weak effects, and a generally comical vibe that doesn’t match the rest of the film, being all that really holds this one down.
Overview: */5
A misguided and generally problematic genre effort, there are some likable factors to this one that give off plenty of potentially worthwhile elements, but it is all undone by the series of flaws here bringing this down. Those with an appreciation for this kind of genre fare or who aren’t bothered by these issues will want to give it a shot, while most others out there should heed extreme caution.
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