'Saccharine' Review
- Tiffany McLaughlin
- 5 hours ago
- 1 min read
Release Date: 05/22/26 [Cinemas]
Genre: Drama. Horror. SciFi.
MPAA: Rated R.
Distributor: Independent Film Company. Shudder.
The Verdict: A Maybe
Hanna is a med student who experiences difficulty controlling her eating and struggles with her body image. When she meets an old friend who has lost a ton of weight, she lets Hanna in on her secret. It’s a capsule pill called “Grey”. When Hanna starts to take the Grey, she experiences strange new hunger cues and witnesses supernatural apparitions, but the pills do help her achieve her weight loss goals. After analyzing the pill and finding out what its shocking contents are, rather than stop taking them, she begins to manufacture it herself and the side effects only worsen.
Saccharine might be too over the top for its own good, but that doesn’t mean it should be ignored. At times, it feels like a nothingburger, with repetitive, predictable plot beats and stretched-out lulls, but I wouldn’t say it’s a complete miss. I really appreciated the exploration of the ghost attachment; it’s an interesting element. But unfortunately, Saccharine attempts to comment on so many different social stigmas that nothing really sticks to the wall. The end result is a muddy message disguised as body positivity. I believe the film's spirit is in the right place, but I can’t look past a movie that, among other things, has its protagonist ingesting toxic chemicals to save herself from a supernatural threat that she provoked in the name of weight loss.
