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

There is a widespread chorus about marriage that stipulates you may find yourself discovering your self in a myriad of recent 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 have been yesterday. That proverb is doubly true for Diana and Homer (Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie, respectively), because the 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 Nineteen 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 digicam lingering on the odd bucolic tranquility of a spot whose stunning floor belies a wierd insidiousness.

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

Diana has been delivered to 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 finest, 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 superb of a creepily, deceptively good medical care skilled, who the couple compares to Mrs. Danvers. Nothing appears terribly incorrect right here, at first, besides that the supposed miracle employee of a physician is nowhere to be discovered, and far of the moment-to-moment care is tough to decipher. One process includes Diana sitting strapped to a chair in entrance of seizure-inducing lights. Her treatment 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 cases of slimy deformed girls that look remarkably like herself, being handled and shouting out in agony. Stranger nonetheless, these visions appear to vanish. Stranger nonethelessDiana witnesses a lady working away by means of the neighboring forest that nobody acknowledges.

As Diana’s “remedies” progress, and he or she grows an increasing number of suspicious of Homer’s intentions, the movie dangers exhausting itself rapidly in its personal thriller field. There’s not a ton of route 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 continuously 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.