The story follows Hana (Midori Francis), a Japanese-American-Australian medical student living in Melbourne who struggles with body image, low self-esteem and late-night binge-eating. She has a crush on her gym coach named Alanya (Madeleine Madden) but feels too insecure to act on it. Her anxiety is further compounded by a screwed-up family life, dominated by her nervous, overbearing mother, Kimie (Showko Showfukutei), who constantly monitors her food intake.
Hana bumps into an old school friend, Melissa, who has achieved a dramatic weight loss. She attributes it to an expensive new 'miracle pill' therapy. Unable to afford the drug, Hana uses her medical school lab equipment to reverse-engineer a single sample pill Melissa gives her. To her horror, Hana discovers the core ingredient is human ashes. Desperate to lose weight and win over Alanya, Hana takes a dark cue from Frankenstein - during her anatomy class, she steals tissue and bone fragments from the deceased female corpse her group is dissecting, incinerating them to cook up her own homemade supply of the diet powder!
The DIY drug works well and Hana loses weight. Her confidence returns and, as a result, she successfully starts dating Alanya. However, the physical and mental side effects are horrific. Hana begins suffering from severe nighttime blackouts, during which she compulsively 'sleep-eats' massive quantities of junk food, yet continues to lose weight. She soon realises she is being terrorised by a supernatural entity linked to Buddhist folklore - a Gaki (Hungry Ghost) - an anguished spirit condemned to an insatiable, eternal hunger that acts like a parasite, draining her nutrients!
I think you will get the gist of where this is going by now as we establish the film's central 'rule' - that there is a ghost haunting Hana, but she can only see it when looking into convex reflective surfaces, like the backs of spoons or 'security' mirrors or the like! As Hana gets thinner, the ghost grows larger, physically - but invisibly - appearing as deep indentations in her mattress and causing floorboards to creak. The film forces us to wonder whether Hana is hallucinating all of this, whether she is indeed possessed and how far she will go to alter her body without causing herself fatal harm.
This is where the gruesome, graphic body-horror gets going in earnest. Can Hana escape? Will she keep her confidence, or will her mind unravel completely? The best is saved for last, as the final scenes deliver a fairly unexpected turn and more gore when she visits Alanya again. It is a total 'they thought it was all over' or 'Jason' moment! Without giving away the exact nature of the tragedy, the final visual is a pitch-black, haunting masterpiece that mirrors the cold, clinical anatomical paintings from Hana's medical school.
Hold onto your hats! It is super, gory fun and the cinematography is superb, focusing on claustrophobic close-ups of eating scenes, internal body functions and the clinical cutting of corpses in the classroom. The filmmakers clearly had great fun with the special effects and have created what is certainly a work of art - in many ways! But you won't like it if you are lily-livered or queasy, so stay away!
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