Pastiche Horror Wears Its Aesthetic Affect On Its Padded Seventies Shoulders To Each Juicy and Exhausting Impact

There is a frequent chorus about marriage that stipulates you will find yourself discovering your self in a myriad of latest relationships all through its lifespan. The particular person you marry just isn’t the particular person they are going to be in twenty years. Hell, they are not the identical particular person they had been yesterday. That proverb is doubly true for Diana and Homer (Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie, respectively), for the reason that former is experiencing bouts of reminiscence loss after a very nasty automobile accident, and the latter’s secretive conduct grows extra unnerving by the hour.

Author-directors Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer’s retro-inspired physique horror romance Honey Bunch wears its influences on its billowing Seventies sleeves. Typically, the movie is extra intent on speaking its bonafides than it’s on languishing in them, and the majority of the movie is hampered by its devotion to its physique horror revival aesthetic. However there’s an eerie calm to the fear that units it aside, with Adam Crosby’s digital camera lingering on the odd bucolic tranquility of a spot whose stunning floor belies an odd insidiousness.

Had been it not for a commanding central efficiency by Glowicki, quite a lot of Honey Bunch would really feel tediously spinoff. In substance, the movie hews too near the vein of A Remedy for Wellness, Unsane and even Shutter Island; all motion pictures which mine their rigidity from a continuing query of a personality’s sanity. However the movie sharply adjustments course about midway by, a transition from kooky medical facility to a extra gnarly allegorical treatise on the always shape-shifting face of marital relations.

Diana has been dropped at this secluded, stunning Victorian property someplace within the Canadian wilderness by her husband as a determined Hail Mary. After a while in a coma, her reminiscence has been spotty at greatest, and he or she depends on a cane to compensate for a broken hip. Dialog between the 2 is chummy however stilted, with frequent playful tiffs that recommend deep cracks within the basis.

At this facility, they’re greeted by Farah (Kate Dickie), whose thick Scottish brogue and beaming smile make her the Platonic preferrred of a creepily, deceptively good medical care skilled, who the couple compares to Mrs. Danvers. Nothing appears terribly unsuitable right here, at first, besides that the supposed miracle employee of a health care provider is nowhere to be discovered, and far of the moment-to-moment care is troublesome to decipher. One process includes Diana sitting strapped to a chair in entrance of seizure-inducing lights. Her medicine prescription requires quickly titrated dosages of one thing that’s supposed to assist along with her reminiscence and her sleep.

However issues get predictably weirder, with Diana stumbling upon a number of situations of slimy deformed girls that look remarkably like herself, being handled and shouting out in agony. Stranger nonetheless, these visions appear to vanish. Stranger nonetheless, Diana witnesses a lady operating away by the neighboring forest that nobody acknowledges.

As Diana’s “remedies” progress, and he or she grows increasingly suspicious of Homer’s intentions, the movie dangers exhausting itself shortly in its personal thriller field. There’s not a ton of course for the filmmakers to go after its preliminary set-up, and it is not till the movie’s last, electrical last act, that it regains its footing as one thing wholly distinct. With its sepia-toned movie inventory and discordant rating, Honey Bunch can regularly really feel extra like pastiche than as a real movie. It is to the actors’ credit score that it really works when it does, and what it finally posits about marriage is as grossly haunting as it’s disturbingly poetic.

Honey Bunch premieres on Shudder on February thirteenth, 2026.