CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 5-22-26

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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review four new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, May 22nd, 2026.

1) THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU

Well, I should probably start this review by saying something that, depending on who’s reading this, may immediately get me kicked out of the nerd community forever: I have never been a Star Wars guy. Ever. Not even remotely.

I know. Sacrilege. I don’t care.

I was the exact right age when the original Star Wars came out in 1977. I was twelve years old. Every single one of my friends became obsessed with it. They saw it twenty times, bought the toys, memorized the dialogue, argued about spaceships and lightsabers and all that stuff.

Meanwhile, a few months later Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out, and while all my friends were lining up to see Star Wars again, I was across the street at the other theater watching Spielberg’s masterpiece for the fourth or fifth time.

Then we’d meet afterward and they’d talk about Wookiees and I’d talk about François Truffaut and alien communication.

That pretty much sums up my relationship with Star Wars for the last fifty years.

Outside of The Empire Strikes Back, which I like quite a bit, and Rogue One, which I genuinely think is terrific, I’ve never cared about the franchise. I don’t hate it. I’m just emotionally disconnected from it.

And honestly, one of the reasons I’ve always been disconnected from it is because I’ve never found much humanity in it. I’ve never really connected emotionally to the characters or the storytelling.

It always felt to me like a loud mashup of better influences: Akira Kurosawa movies, Flash Gordon serials, and especially Frank Herbert’s Dune. And now that Denis Villeneuve has made two genuinely great Dune movies that actually explore politics, religion, colonialism, messianic myths, and complicated human relationships, the emptiness of a lot of modern Star Wars becomes even more obvious to me.

So with all that said, let me also add this: I have never seen a single episode of The Mandalorian. Not one. I don’t know the mythology. I don’t know the supporting characters. I don’t follow the Disney+ shows. I couldn’t tell you the difference between half these creatures.

In fact, until people at the screening corrected me, I literally thought Grogu was just Baby Yoda. Apparently he’s not Baby Yoda. He’s just the same species as Yoda. Fine. Whatever.

So I walked into The Mandalorian and Grogu completely cold.

And honestly? I don’t think it mattered at all because the movie is so astonishingly simplistic and one-dimensional that nobody could possibly be confused by it.

Jon Favreau, who co-created the series and directs this film, essentially delivers two hours of loud CGI noise stitched together with repetitive action scenes, recycled imagery from better movies, and endless attempts at “cute” comedy involving puppets and little gremlin creatures that feel ripped directly from Despicable Me.

That’s basically the movie.

Pedro Pascal (who is supposedly the star of this thing) is barely even in it physically. He’s wearing a helmet for 95% of the runtime, so for most of the movie he’s basically just a voice-over performance attached to a stunt double.

There’s one extended sequence where he’s unmasked and tortured and forced into underwater combat with giant monsters, but outside of that, Pedro Pascal’s actual presence barely registers.

The emotional relationship between Din Djarin and Grogu (which I guess is supposed to be the heart of the movie) completely falls flat for me. Maybe if you’ve watched three seasons of the TV show you care deeply about their father-son bond. I didn’t buy it for a second here. I never cared whether either one of them survived because obviously they’re going to survive.

The plot itself barely matters. The New Republic hires the Mandalorian and Grogu to rescue Rotta the Hutt (the son of Jabba the Hutt, voiced by Jeremy Allen White) from criminal gangs in the Outer Rim. Sigourney Weaver shows up briefly as a military leader who sends them on the mission. There are Imperial remnants plotting vague evil things in the background. There are bounty hunters. There are monsters. There are endless fight scenes. There are endless chase scenes.

That’s it.

And every single sequence feels assembled from pieces of other movies.

The opening action scene is actually the best part of the film. There’s a fairly well-directed infiltration sequence where the Mandalorian storms a hideout, and for about ten minutes I thought maybe this thing might actually work. The shootouts are cleanly staged. The editing has some rhythm. The Mandalorian character is established effectively.

Then the movie immediately collapses into repetitive CGI sludge.

There are entire sequences in this movie where every single thing onscreen is animated. At that point, why even bother pretending this is live action? There’s a gladiator battle sequence involving giant monsters and robots and creatures where literally nothing feels tactile or real.

It’s just pixels smashing into other pixels for ten minutes at a time. There are giant bugs, giant worms, giant alien beasts, endless CGI landscapes, endless digital crowds, it becomes numbing almost immediately.

And the action scenes are all exactly the same. Fight scene. CGI monster. Escape sequence. Loud explosion. Cute Grogu reaction shot. Repeat. Over and over and over again.

There’s also a whole extended section that is such a blatant rip-off of Blade Runner that I honestly expected Ridley Scott to stand up in the theater screaming. The lighting, the production design, the crowded neon streets, the weird food vendors, the rain-soaked atmosphere...it's not homage anymore. It’s theft. There are chunks of this movie that look like rejected concept art from Blade Runner 2049.

And then Martin Scorsese shows up. I swear to God.

Martin Scorsese has a cameo voice role as a paranoid alien shopkeeper with giant bushy eyebrows because (get this) Martin Scorsese has big eyebrows in real life. That’s the joke. That’s literally the level of comedy we’re dealing with here. He’s this CGI alien creature with multiple arms and giant eyebrows, and the audience is apparently supposed to laugh because “Hey, it’s Marty Scorsese with bushy eyebrows in space!” Wonderful.

Then there are these little creatures called Anzellans (I guess one of them is named Babu Frik from some previous Star Wars thing?) and they are absolutely just Minions. That’s all they are. Tiny puppet Minions. They make weird noises, they run around fixing ships, they say goofy nonsense, and the movie pauses repeatedly so we can watch them be wacky. So in between endless CGI battles, we get cute little puppet comedy scenes with Baby Yoda and space Minions.

None of it is funny.

And all the Grogu stuff drove me nuts because the movie never establishes any consistency with his powers. Sometimes he uses the Force to save people or move objects around. Other times they’re literally about to die and he just stands there doing nothing.

So the whole movie I kept wondering: why doesn’t this little green guy use the Force now? Why was he able to do it before but not here? Is he lazy? Is he tired? Did the script just forget? There’s absolutely no internal consistency.

But honestly the bigger issue is that none of this has any emotional weight whatsoever. Compare this to Villeneuve’s Dune movies where every action has consequences, where politics matter, where religion matters, where relationships matter, where characters actually have depth and conflicting motivations. The Mandalorian and Grogu has none of that. It’s just visual noise. Loud, expensive, repetitive visual noise.

And man, is it loud.

I saw this in IMAX, and honestly the overwhelming sound design is the only thing that kept me awake at certain points. Disney reportedly spent around $165 million on this movie, and every penny is onscreen in the CGI and sound effects.

Unfortunately, they forgot to spend any money on writing an actual script. The character motivations are paper thin. The dialogue is generic. The humor is juvenile. The emotional beats don’t land. The action scenes become exhausting.

And Jon Favreau, who has made a few good movies before, seems completely content here just delivering fan-service sludge for people who point at the screen every time a familiar puppet walks by.

Now look, maybe hardcore fans of The Mandalorian series will love this. Maybe if you’ve invested years into these characters and this mythology, some of these cameos and references and emotional moments land harder. I’ll admit that possibility. But as a standalone movie? This thing is empty.

And I will say this: even though I had never seen a single episode of the show, I was never confused. Because the storytelling is so basic and simplistic that there’s no possible way to get lost. Good guys fight bad guys. CGI creatures attack. Cute puppet eats food. Repeat.

That’s the movie.

I was bored. I was emotionally disconnected. I found the humor painfully unfunny, the action repetitive, and the visuals overwhelming to the point of exhaustion. And by the end, I honestly couldn’t wait for it to be over.

If anything, this movie confirmed exactly why I’ve never connected with Star Wars in the first place. After seeing The Mandalorian and Grogu, I can safely say I still have absolutely no interest in watching the television series.

This thing is loud, empty, repetitive, and completely devoid of genuine emotional stakes. A giant expensive IMAX headache. - ⭐️1/2

2) I LOVE BOOSTERS

Boots Riley doesn’t make movies the way anybody else makes movies. He just doesn’t. The guy came out of the world of revolutionary hip-hop and political art, and he brings that same anarchic energy to filmmaking.

Before he ever directed a frame, Riley was already a legend through The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club, mixing radical politics, satire, funk, absurdity, and razor-sharp social commentary into music that sounded like it was beamed in from another planet.

Then he made Sorry to Bother You in 2018, which remains one of the boldest, weirdest, funniest directorial debuts of the last twenty years. That movie started as a dark workplace satire and somehow mutated into a nightmare science-fiction comedy involving labor exploitation, corporate insanity, code-switching, and horse-human hybrids.

Most filmmakers would spend the rest of their careers trying to top something that audacious.

Well, Boots Riley apparently looked at Sorry to Bother You and said, “Nah, I can go crazier.”

And he absolutely does with I Love Boosters, which is one of the most gloriously unhinged, batshit insane, wildly entertaining movies I’ve seen in a very long time. I honestly don’t think you’re going to see a crazier movie this year. And I mean that as the highest compliment possible.

On the surface, I Love Boosters looks like a crime comedy. You’ve got a trio of shoplifters (boosters) living out of an abandoned fried chicken joint in a surreal version of the Bay Area. Corvette, Sade, and Mariah, played by Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, and Taylour Paige, steal designer clothes from luxury stores and resell them to the community at affordable prices.

They call it “fashion-forward philanthropy,” which is exactly the kind of phrase that tells you what kind of movie you’re in for. The Velvet Gang operates like Robin Hood by way of a neon-colored acid trip.

But this thing escalates almost immediately into something completely bonkers.

Corvette is also an aspiring designer whose ideas are basically stolen and monetized by the fashion industry.

The main villain is Christie Smith, played by Demi Moore in one of the funniest and most committed performances of her career. Christie is this monstrous fashion mogul running a sweatshop empire while publicly referring to the boosters as “low-class urban bitches.”

When Corvette discovers Christie has ripped off one of her original designs, the movie shifts into revenge mode, heist mode, sci-fi mode, anti-capitalist revolution mode, and eventually “there are no rules anymore” mode. And that’s when Boots Riley really starts cooking.

What makes I Love Boosters work so brilliantly is that all the insanity actually means something. Riley isn’t just throwing weird imagery at the screen because “LOL random.”

Every bizarre visual gag, every piece of absurd production design, every sci-fi tangent, every musical number, every surrealist detour feeds into the movie’s themes about capitalism, consumerism, exploitation, race, labor, and wealth inequality. The movie has serious things on its mind, but it delivers those ideas through the loudest, most colorful, most outrageous cinematic language imaginable.

And man, this movie is colorful. It’s like Riley took every visual idea he’s ever had and shoved it into one movie without fear. There are insane edits, animated flourishes, stop-motion touches, crazy camera tricks, ridiculous production design, musical interludes, goo-covered teleportation devices, furniture attacking people, and sequences so visually overloaded that my jaw literally dropped.

There were moments during this movie where I was just sitting there laughing in disbelief at what I was watching.

Now, a lot of movies lately have tried this hyperactive visual style. You’ve seen filmmakers desperately throwing Tarantino references, music-video editing, pop-art chaos, and faux-surrealism at the screen hoping it’ll feel fresh. But so much of it feels hollow and derivative.

It’s style without purpose. Riley actually understands how to use cinematic madness as storytelling. Even when I Love Boosters gets completely out of control (and trust me, it absolutely does) it still somehow maintains its own internal rhythm and logic.

There’s an unbelievable sequence involving Demi Moore’s luxury apartment, which was apparently built at a 45-degree angle because of course it was. The entire apartment is tilted like some insane German expressionist fever dream, and Keke Palmer has to maneuver a coffee cart through it while doing absurd physical comedy that had me crying laughing.

Palmer’s performance in this movie is astonishing. She’s always been terrific (great comedic timing, real dramatic chops, charismatic as hell) but this might be the best thing she’s ever done. The physicality alone is incredible.

Keke Palmer carries this movie emotionally, comedically, and physically, but Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige are equally fantastic. The chemistry between the three leads is phenomenal. They feel like actual friends, actual co-conspirators, actual survivors scraping through this bizarre capitalist nightmare together.

Then there’s LaKeith Stanfield, reuniting with Riley after Sorry to Bother You, playing a character called Pinky Ring Guy. And if that name alone doesn’t tell you what kind of performance this is, nothing will.

He’s essentially this supernatural model whose seductive powers are so literal that he can physically suck souls out of romantic partners. Stanfield is operating on another frequency entirely here. Completely deadpan. Completely insane. Hilarious every second he’s onscreen.

The supporting cast is stacked across the board. Eiza González, who was honestly the only good thing in Guy Ritchie’s In the Grey, is terrific here as a radical union organizer. Will Poulter is wonderfully bizarre.

Eric André shows up briefly and predictably steals every second he has. Jermaine Fowler is great. And then Don Cheadle arrives late in the movie wearing a giant fake belly, a ridiculous wig, and enough bizarre prosthetics to make him barely recognizable, and somehow the movie gets even crazier from there.

At one point there are animatronic chairs swallowing people. At another point there’s shimmering teleportation goo involved in a sci-fi revolution against global capitalism. And then the climax happens. Good lord, the climax.

The final fifteen minutes of this movie are completely deliriously over-the-top filmmaking. It’s musical numbers, time travel, sci-fi chaos, revolutionary politics, explosions of color, grotesque comedy, absurdist action, and anti-billionaire satire all colliding at once.

I was literally shaking my head in disbelief through the entire ending, and I mean that in the best way possible.

Now, is the movie perfect? No. Absolutely not. Some gags go on too long. Riley occasionally hammers points home repeatedly when he’s already made them effectively the first time. There are stretches where the movie threatens to lose itself in its own excess. Some ideas are underexplained.

Some sequences feel like Riley had fifteen ideas and refused to cut any of them. And honestly? There’s a decent chance some audiences are going to completely reject this movie. It’s riskier and even more extreme than Sorry to Bother You. Riley pushes things so far stylistically that some people are absolutely going to check out.

But I was locked in.

Because underneath all the madness is genuine passion, genuine anger, genuine creativity, and genuine originality. Boots Riley is one of the few filmmakers working right now who truly feels dangerous in a good way. You never know where his movies are going to go next.

You can’t predict them. They don’t feel focus-grouped or sanitized or assembled by committee. They feel alive. And I Love Boosters is spectacularly alive.

It’s loud, messy, hilarious, excessive, politically charged, visually insane, musically inventive, and completely fearless. It’s a movie with absolutely no interest in playing things safe, and in a cinematic landscape where so much feels recycled and manufactured, that kind of creative lunacy is exhilarating.

I had an absolute blast watching this completely nuts movie. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

3) PASSENGER

I often wonder why studios decide they’re going to hide certain movies from critics. Sometimes it makes perfect sense because the movie is terrible and they know it’s terrible. Other times it doesn’t make any sense at all.

And in the case of Passenger, the new supernatural horror film from André Øvredal, I am genuinely baffled as to why Paramount buried this thing and refused to screen it for critics ahead of release.

I had to see it opening day in a sparely populated theater like everybody else.

Now maybe Paramount is just making questionable decisions in general these days (which honestly seems possible considering some of the bizarre things they’ve been doing lately) but hiding Passenger was a mistake because this is one of the better horror films I’ve seen this year. And considering how many horror movies have already been dumped into theaters throughout 2026, that’s saying something.

This has been a huge year for horror already. Some of the films have been terrific, some have been awful, and some have been insanely overrated. I still think Obsession is one of the most overrated horror movies of the last decade. Everybody seems to worship that movie and I thought it was just well-acted but derivative slop.

Meanwhile, here comes Passenger, which Paramount basically dumped into theaters with almost no confidence, and it turns out to be an extraordinarily well-crafted piece of horror filmmaking.

And honestly, at this point, André Øvredal has just proven himself to be one of the best horror craftsmen working right now.

This is the guy who made The Autopsy of Jane Doe, which is terrific. He made Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which I loved. He made The Last Voyage of the Demeter, which was visually fantastic and underrated.

The guy understands suspense. He understands atmosphere. He understands how to use darkness and composition and sound and editing to make an audience deeply uncomfortable. And Passenger is loaded with discomfort.

The setup is simple but incredibly effective. Maddie and Tyler are a newly engaged couple who’ve abandoned their lives in New York City to embrace “van life,” which honestly already sounds terrifying enough to me without adding supernatural demons into the equation.

Tyler is enthusiastic about living nomadically on the road. Maddie is far less certain. She grew up bouncing between foster homes and unstable living situations, so the idea of never having a permanent home again hits her very differently emotionally.

Right away, the movie establishes that these are two people who love each other but fundamentally see life differently. That relationship stuff actually matters here. It’s not just filler between scare sequences. The tension between them feels real.

But before we even meet the couple, Øvredal gives us a fantastic opening prologue involving two men driving late at night on a dark rural road. One guy pulls over to urinate in the woods while the other waits in the car, and from there the scene escalates into pure nightmare territory.

It’s beautifully paced, incredibly eerie, and climaxes with a spectacular jump scare and crash sequence that immediately hooks you. That opening alone tells you you’re in very good hands.

So Maddie and Tyler witness the aftermath of this horrific crash. And here’s where the folklore aspect of the movie kicks in. There are rules among nomads, drifters, and people who live on the road. The “Hobo Code.” The mythology says you never stop at night. You never investigate accidents. You keep moving.

Well, they break those rules. And once they stop at the scene of the crash, they bring something back with them.

That something is “The Passenger,” this terrifying demonic highway entity that begins stalking them relentlessly across empty roads, parking lots, campsites, and desolate stretches of America. The creature itself is wonderfully creepy, with pale skin, dark hollow eyes, stringy hair, lurking just at the edge of darkness. Øvredal wisely keeps the thing partially obscured most of the time, which makes it even scarier.

And man, there are some incredibly well-directed sequences in this movie.

One of the things Øvredal does brilliantly is use universal fears tied to road travel and nighttime driving. Anybody who’s ever taken a long road trip (especially late at night) knows that weird feeling. The exhaustion. The paranoia. The strange roadside encounters.

The tension that develops inside a car after hours and hours of driving. The isolation of empty roads. The way headlights distort the darkness. The weird stuff you think you see out there. This movie taps directly into all of those fears.

I grew up taking massive road trips. We drove everywhere. Florida. California. Cross-country trips. I know exactly what it feels like to be half asleep in a car at three in the morning staring out at dark highways and wondering what’s out there. Passenger absolutely nails that eerie psychological feeling.

There’s a phenomenal sequence in a parking lot where Maddie is simply trying to walk back to the van at night. That’s it. That’s the setup. But Øvredal stages it so masterfully that it becomes terrifying. She hears noises. Strange cars move unexpectedly.

The van itself seems farther away every time she looks back at it. The geography of the parking lot starts feeling warped and wrong. And the tension builds and builds until the Passenger suddenly appears inside the van itself.

It’s incredibly effective filmmaking.

Then there’s a fantastic scene involving a tire blowout in the middle of nowhere at night. Tyler is desperately trying to jack up the van and replace the tire while Maddie senses the Passenger approaching. The van slips off the jack. The pressure escalates. The darkness closes in. And meanwhile we know the cardinal rule has already been broken: they stopped at night.

The suspense in that scene is unbelievable.

Melissa Leo shows up midway through the movie as Diana, a veteran road nomad who understands the Hobo Code and the mythology surrounding the Passenger. Now yes, there’s definitely an exposition dump section where she explains a little too much lore all at once.

But honestly, by that point I was already completely hooked, so I didn’t really care. Because the movie is so well made.

And I love how Øvredal weaves folklore into modern anxieties. The Hobo Code stuff is fascinating. The Saint Christopher mythology is terrific. Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, becomes this recurring symbol throughout the movie.

Growing up, we always had a Saint Christopher medal hanging from the rearview mirror during road trips. Tons of people did. And here the movie uses that folklore almost like a supernatural weapon against the Passenger.

The more Saint Christopher medals they collect, the safer they become. It's such a smart use of old religious folklore inside a modern horror framework.

And then there’s one sequence in this movie that I absolutely loved.

Maddie and Tyler decide to have a romantic outdoor movie night beside the van. They set up a projector screen in the woods and start watching Roman Holiday. First of all, choosing Roman Holiday is genius because thematically it actually connects beautifully to Passenger. Two people escaping normal life. Wandering. Freedom. Romantic idealism.

Then the horror begins.

The Passenger starts emerging through the woods while Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck are projected across the trees. At one point the demon’s face literally pushes through the projection screen while Gregory Peck’s image flickers across it. Then the couple uses the projector beam itself to search through the woods as fragments of Roman Holiday illuminate the darkness.

It’s brilliant. Seriously brilliant.

It’s one of the cleverest horror sequences I’ve seen in a while because it takes this warm beloved classic film and transforms it into nightmare imagery without disrespecting the original movie. It’s a beautiful tribute to classic cinema while simultaneously weaponizing it for horror. That sequence alone proves Øvredal is a filmmaker who genuinely understands movies.

And honestly, the whole movie works because the emotional core works. Lou Llobell is outstanding as Maddie. Really terrific performance. You feel her exhaustion, her uncertainty, her fear, her frustration with Tyler, and her growing terror. Jacob Scipio is very good too, but this is really Maddie’s movie emotionally, and Llobell carries it beautifully.

The climax, which takes place at a Saint Christopher church in the desert at night, is wild. Bloody, funny, scary, suspenseful, weirdly emotional, and it ties together all the folklore and relationship themes really effectively.

And yes, there are some logic issues here and there. Horror characters occasionally do stupid things because otherwise the movie doesn’t happen. That’s part of the genre. You accept it.

What matters is whether the movie works on a visceral level. And Passenger absolutely does.

This thing had me on edge for almost the entire runtime. It’s creepy, atmospheric, suspenseful, genuinely scary in spots, occasionally funny, and beautifully directed from beginning to end. Øvredal once again proves he’s one of the best pure horror directors working today. The guy knows exactly how to build tension and exactly how to exploit primal fears.

And if you’ve ever been on a long nighttime road trip (especially one where things started feeling weird and uneasy at three in the morning on some dark empty highway) this movie is going to hit you hard.

Because Passenger understands that specific kind of fear perfectly.

A terrific horror movie and absolutely worth seeking out. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

4) SACCHARINE

There’s no doubt that Australian filmmaker Natalie Erika James is an interesting director. She’s a filmmaker who clearly wants to use horror as a way to explore deeply personal, deeply uncomfortable issues, specifically issues tied to mental health, physical health, trauma, and women’s experiences.

Her debut feature, Relic from 2020, was a genuinely effective slow-burn horror movie that used supernatural dread as a metaphor for dementia and aging. It was creepy, sad, atmospheric, and emotionally grounded. You could feel the grief and fear in every frame of that movie.

Then she followed it up with Apartment 7A, which was essentially a psychological prequel to Rosemary’s Baby. Now look, that movie was nowhere near as good as Polanski’s original classic, obviously, but it had some interesting ideas.

There was a strong visual sense to it, Julia Garner was very good in it, and James again used horror to explore something very specifically tied to women’s bodies and women’s experiences, in that case pregnancy, paranoia, and the physical and psychological toll that comes with it.

So now we get to her third feature, Saccharine, and once again she’s tackling a very timely issue through the lens of body horror and psychological horror.

This time it’s body dysmorphia, diet culture, eating disorders, self-image, and specifically the modern Ozempic era we’re currently living through, where miracle weight-loss drugs and overnight transformations dominate social media and modern culture. And honestly, that’s a really interesting premise for a horror movie.

The problem is, Saccharine is almost entirely ideas. Ideas without execution.

The setup is undeniably compelling. Hana, played by Midori Francis, is a first-year medical student dealing with severe body-image issues, binge eating, insecurity, and childhood trauma tied to food and appearance. She secretly longs for confidence and affection while obsessively criticizing herself in the mirror.

One day she discovers a miracle weight-loss drug called “The Grey,” which creates instant dramatic weight loss. Since she can’t afford the insanely expensive black-market price, she reverse engineers it in her university lab only to discover that the core ingredient is human ashes.

Which is already a pretty fantastic horror premise.

Things spiral from there. Hana begins secretly incinerating pieces of a cadaver in anatomy class (an obese corpse cruelly nicknamed “Big Bertha”) to manufacture her own stash of the drug. The pounds melt off. Her confidence rises. She starts connecting with Alanya, her gym instructor crush played by Madeleine Madden.

But of course the side effects kick in. Hallucinations. Hunger. Psychological breakdowns. And eventually the ghost of Big Bertha begins haunting Hana in increasingly grotesque and aggressive ways.

Now, right away, comparisons to The Substance are unavoidable. Both films are body horror movies about women destroying themselves physically and psychologically in pursuit of impossible beauty standards. Both involve experimental substances that transform the body while unleashing grotesque consequences. Both use horror as commentary on modern beauty culture.

The difference is that while I already thought The Substance was wildly overrated and derivative of much better Cronenberg body horror, Saccharine somehow manages to be even more simplistic and even less effective. And I wasn’t crazy about The Substance to begin with.

What Natalie Erika James does here is throw every possible visual and thematic idea at the wall and hope that sheer intensity carries the movie. Unfortunately, very little sticks.

The film is overloaded with grotesque close-ups of chewing mouths, binge eating, greasy food, sloppy body horror imagery, screaming sound design, hyper-edited hallucination sequences, distorted mirrors, medical instruments, flesh, gore, and jump scares. The movie is constantly screaming at the audience instead of actually developing its themes in any meaningful way.

There are moments where you can see the movie that Saccharine wants to be. Early on, there’s actually an interesting recurring visual motif involving Hana only seeing the ghost of Big Bertha reflected through distorted surfaces like spoons or warped reflections.

Obviously that’s meant to symbolize distorted self-image and how people suffering from body dysmorphia literally perceive themselves differently. That’s a potentially powerful idea. But James handles it with such heavy-handed obviousness that it never lands emotionally or psychologically. It just sits there as “the metaphor.”

That’s the whole movie, honestly. Metaphors sitting on the surface screaming for attention.

The film also briefly introduces the concept of the “Hungry Ghost,” which comes from Buddhist and Eastern folklore traditions. That could have opened the door to something genuinely fascinating spiritually and psychologically.

There are themes here about insatiable hunger, emotional emptiness, self-destruction, shame, and consumption that could have connected beautifully to those traditions. But again, none of it is explored with any depth. The movie just tosses the idea into the blender with fifty other ideas before moving onto another gross-out sequence.

And eventually the whole thing collapses under its own excess.

By the final act, Saccharine becomes an exhausting barrage of loud visual noise and over-the-top horror imagery. Hana is performing grotesque surgical procedures on herself in dumpsters while giant ghostly manifestations stalk her through aggressively edited nightmare sequences.

The Hungry Ghost itself becomes increasingly problematic and borderline offensive in how it’s portrayed. At first the spirit of Big Bertha functions symbolically, but as the movie escalates, the handling of the overweight ghost character becomes really uncomfortable and ugly in ways I don’t think the film fully understands.

The movie wants to critique body shame while simultaneously using exaggerated obesity as grotesque nightmare fuel, and that contradiction becomes impossible to ignore by the end. It leaves a really bad taste in your mouth. No pun intended there.

And stylistically the movie just becomes a mess. James uses claustrophobic close-ups, overwhelming sound design, amplified chewing noises, rapid editing, body horror gore, cold sterile medical imagery, distorted hallucinations, and it’s all happening all the time. There’s no rhythm to it. No modulation. No balance. It’s just sensory overload from beginning to end. The movie mistakes relentless unpleasantness for depth.

Midori Francis does what she can. She’s committed, and there are moments where you can feel the pain and insecurity underneath Hana’s behavior. But the script never allows her to become a fully dimensional character because the film is too busy throwing visual metaphors and gross-out horror at the screen.

Nobody really gets to breathe here. Danielle Macdonald is likable as Hana’s supportive friend, Madeleine Madden is fine, but the performances get swallowed whole by the movie’s chaotic approach.

And that’s ultimately what’s frustrating about Saccharine. There are genuinely interesting ideas buried in this thing. Commentary about Ozempic culture, impossible beauty standards, body dysmorphia, self-loathing, binge eating, hunger as emotional trauma, the commercialization of weight loss, distorted self-perception...there’s a lot there.

But James never explores any of it beyond the surface because she’s too busy assaulting the audience with body horror, visual noise, gore, jump scares, and grotesque imagery.

It’s a movie that desperately wants to shock you and make you uncomfortable, but after a while it just becomes exhausting and repetitive.

Which is disappointing because Natalie Erika James is clearly talented. Relic proved that. Even Apartment 7A had moments of strong execution. But Saccharine feels like a filmmaker drowning in her own ideas and visual excess without the discipline to shape them into something coherent or emotionally resonant.

So no, I can’t recommend Saccharine. It’s loud, messy, heavy-handed, and ultimately pretty shallow despite pretending to have enormous depth. There are ideas in here worth exploring, but the movie never explores them in any meaningful or thoughtful way.

Instead it buries them underneath an avalanche of grotesque close-ups, screaming sound design, and chaotic body horror imagery.

A big letdown from a filmmaker who I still think has real talent. Hopefully her next movie finds the balance that this one completely loses. - ⭐️1/2

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