By Jason Osiason

Saccharine might as well be called The Supplements. It’s a nasty little wellness horror story about body shame, compulsive cravings, and the weirdly greasy side of self improvement culture. The film follows Hana, a struggling med student quietly drowning in the constant pressure to fix her body. When she stumbles onto what looks like the next miracle weight loss breakthrough, capsules made from the ashes of donated bodies she secretly cremates, things spiral very quickly.

The premise is as twisted as it sounds and the movie fully commits to it. What starts as desperation slowly mutates into obsession. The more Hana takes these capsules the more her relationship with her own body starts to warp. Hunger becomes something primal. Shame becomes something corrosive. And the entire pursuit of self perfection turns into a grotesque feedback loop.

You can feel the DNA of movies like Raw and The Substance in the setup. Body horror built around the way society polices women’s bodies. But Saccharine never feels like a knockoff. It leans harder into sleaze and discomfort. This movie is sweaty, gross, and intentionally a little grimy in ways that make the whole wellness industry satire land harder.

The horror itself gets extremely physical. The camera stays uncomfortably close to Hana’s face and body as things start going wrong. Skin, sweat, hunger, cravings. The film wants you to feel the compulsive ugliness of it all. The pursuit of beauty becomes something almost animalistic.

And yes, the movie absolutely gets silly. It throws a lot of ideas at the screen. Diet culture satire, supernatural possession, addiction metaphors, grotesque body horror set pieces. At times it feels like the film is juggling five different horror movies at once. Some of the plot mechanics get clunky because of that.

But the silliness actually makes sense in context. The entire world the film is satirizing is already absurd. Wellness culture constantly promises impossible transformations through powders, pills, and miracle shortcuts. The movie pushes that logic to its natural extreme. If people will swallow anything in the name of fixing themselves, why not swallow the literal dead?

That escalation is where the movie finds its identity. It stops being just a horror film and becomes this twisted satire of self improvement culture eating itself alive. The result is messy, sleazy, disgustingly gross fun. And even when it goes a little off the rails, it is pretty impossible to shake. [B]