Name: Midori Francis
Notable past credits: “Sex Lives of College Girls” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” In 2021 she received a daytime Emmy nomination for Netflix series “Dash & Lily.”
Sundance project: “Relic” writer-director Natalie Erika James’ body horror film “Saccharine,” which was acquired by IFC and Shudder shortly before the festival premiere.
“ This movie is not meant to be comfortable,” says Francis, the afternoon after the midnight premiere of “Saccharine” at the festival. “ I could feel in the room that people were moved and disturbed — and that to me is what art’s about.”
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The lead actress was reflecting on the audience’s audible reactions to the film’s moments of body horror. Francis stars as a young lovestruck medical student who starts consuming human ashes as part of a weight loss craze, and is soon haunted by the dead man’s presence.
“[James] so astutely portrays, unpacks, challenges, covertly subverts everything about what it’s like to have an eating disorder, to be stuck in a shame spiral, to be under the guise of compulsion,” says Francis, crediting James’ use of horror to comment on body dysmorphia and societal expectations, in the vein of films like “The Substance.”
The actress, who’s based in Los Angeles, was excited to check Sundance off her bucket list during the festival’s last year in Park City. The film will next screen at the Berlin Film Festival ahead of its future theatrical and streaming release.
Starting in early February, Francis will be onstage starring in the world premiere of play “Sylvia, Sylvia, Sylvia” at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.
“ It’s about a once celebrated novelist who is trying to create her next book and is suffering from writer’s block,” says Francis, adding that it, like “Saccharine,” is also a ghost story: her character invokes the ghost of Sylvia Path for help. “It’s about the intersection between mental health and art, what we sacrifice in terms of health and mental health to make something great,” she adds. “At what point do we draw that line?”
