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| Honey Bunch Photo: Berlin International Film Festival |
A woman with no memory. A mysterious private clinic, based in a remote house with sprawling gardens. A secretive doctor who offers experimental treatment, and a wife (Grace Glowicki) who loves but doesn’t trust her older, academic husband (Ben Petrie). Honey Bunch, which screened at Berlin 2025, has all the ingredients of a classic horror movies, yet it ends up going somewhere quite different. To begin to talk about how it does so would be to give too much away, so when I spoke to directors Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer during that festival, we decided to begin by discussing the tropes the film employs.
“The first one that comes to my mind is the housekeeper, the staunch housekeeper who's keeping their master's secrets,” ventures Dusty.
“And who's often nefarious and fills the role of the villain,” Madeleine points out.
“Yeah. So we've got Kate Dickey playing this role, and alongside the housekeeper, there's the sort of henchman butler character that is the kind of the Igor type, the dim witted helper.”
Madeleine nods. “And you have certain expectations of who these characters are and what their relationship dynamics will be, and throughout the course of the film you start to realise it's more complex and different than what you've expected, and it goes in a unique direction.”
“And you've also got the doctor character, which is another trope,” Dusty adds. “This kind of nefarious doctor in the dark, doing their experiments. And again, we’re hoping that we can show people the humanity of this character.”
I tell them that the film interests me because a lot of stories that play with some of the issues it explores are quite anti science, and often quite anti-disabled people as well, in that they expect people to not want to live with anything difficult in their lives. This is doing something very different from that. Was that part of their original intention?
“It really was, actually,” says Dusty. “I'm glad that you said that because that is what we hoped for. We hope that the end is showing it’s positive and that people come away feeling happy for them and feeling good.” He laughs. “I feel incredibly inarticulate.”
“A lot of thought was put into how we capture rehabilitation and chronic pain and memory loss,” says Madeleine. “We were drawing on our own personal experiences with family members and people we were close to, and wanting to be very thoughtful about how we approached it.”
“The question of disability is something that came up a lot in our writing,” says Dusty. “We really wanted to write something that was progressive in the way we approached that and that wasn't falling into any traps. That wasn't ableist in its approach.”
To build up those themes and characters and expectations, they’ve done an awful lot of work with the production design.
“Trying to build a world that was unique and very specifically grounded in a time period was really important to us,” says Madeleine. “Finding the manor was essential. We spent six months scouring the countryside.”
“It turns out there aren't a lot of manor houses in Canada,” Dusty explains.
“That was a tricky one because in a way, the settings are characters in the film and they come with a certain history and baggage for a lot of these characters,” she continues. “Being able to transform these spaces so that we could ultimately control the colour palette and the design of the movie was quite essential.”
Dustin agrees. “I mean, the manor house, the decade the film is set in is the Seventies but we didn't want to just have everything look like the Seventies. So we've got this manor house setting within the Seventies setting, which is the contemporary time of the film, and then we've got the Forties wallpaper and production design elements from the Forties, and then from even earlier. We’ve got some Victorian stuff in there as well. And really the manor kind of serves as the memory of the doctor and the doctor's wife. Their memories are in this house. And then we've got this other house which serves as the doctor's present. And that that we built more with the Seventies feel and aesthetic.”
And then there’s that marvellous garden as well. Was that actually at the same location?
“We were so lucky, it was,” says Madeleine. “And the groundskeeper was this 80-year-old man who took so much pride in maintaining the garden and was so enthusiastic about wanting to make sure that it looked as spectacular as it does in the movie.”
“He was trimming the hedge maze to the bitter end for us to get the perfect shot of that maze,” Dusty says. “And he built all of the statues himself.”
There’s a scene towards the end where characters are moving through rocks that has a very Picnic At Hanging Rock feeling, I note, and Dusty says that he watched the Australian classic not long before filming so it may have had a subconscious influence.
“That's a totally different location,” Madeleine reveals. “Part of the challenge is that you never could find every specific space in one place. It took a lot of effort to find the perfect wooded area, that has a little hole right in the tree line where they could see it. And then when you put it all together, it creates a real feeling that this space is kind of special. It's magical.”
“We spent a lot of time devising the world in our heads and making maps of how it all connected together,” says Dusty. “So we had this imaginary space, and then it was our job to find all the perfect locations and build them into this map that we came up with.”
“Even the moment where they go through the cave is just so beautiful and eerie,” says Madeleine. “It almost looks like the iris of an eye as they climb through. It was a challenge to just to find that one specific thing that we wanted.”
I enquire about the rabbit motifs which appear throughout the film.
“The rabbits were a symbol for Kate and Julian's characters,” says Dusty. “We found this brooch of two rabbits nestling together and just felt like it was the perfect representation of the love between a couple, whether it be a mother, daughter, a father, son...”
“There's obvious symbolic representation in Alice In Wonderland, which also kind of works here,” says Madeleine. “And we used a lot of rabbits in our last film. It's funny because we we received a lot of criticism for it, yet here we are. We put in more rabbits. Love those rabbits.”
I compliment them on their cast – not all of them big names, but the sort of actors one turns to when looking first and foremost for quality.
“For Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie, we wrote the characters for them,” says Madeleine. “We saw them in this terrific short film that Ben directed called Her Friend Adam, that won the Jury Prize at Sundance many years ago. And then Grace made her first feature, called Tito, and it was a really physically transformative role. We knew she would just be so perfect to play Diana because it had similar challenging qualities. So we invited them over for dinner, pitched them the whole movie, and sculpted and developed the characters and their arcs with them.”
“Then we had quite a long rehearsal process with the two of them as well, just really exploring the characters and building the characters,” Dusty says.
“And then for India Brown, we saw her in this Apple TV show in Beijing when she was 13. She was amazing, and we just wrote the part for her,” says Madeleine of the film’s impressive younger star. “We were very happy that she responded to the material and that she was available. And we've just been huge fans of Kate Dickey and Jason Isaacs forever.”
“I went to the Drama Centre in London, and when I was there, I saw Red Road,” says Dusty. “One of my teachers showed it to me, and the performance in that just blew me away. It was up there with Possession as my top two performances of all time. So it was always a dream to work with Kate. And we rehearsed with her a lot too. She came on quite early and rehearsed with us and with Julian [Richings]. And Jason was the last piece of the puzzle to come in. We never thought that he would say yes to doing it. And he read it, and he has daughters, and it really resonated with him. So that was incredibly lucky. He was so generous on set and just constantly standing in for other actors for eye lines. He would do his lines silently, miming the whole scene with the same level of commitment, so that when we were doing coverage of the other actors, they had something in the room to feed off of. It was absolutely brilliant. He never went to the bathroom once.”
“He was just always there, always present, always engaged,” says Madeleine. “Our schedule was really complicated. We had to move things around. He was supposed to go visit his daughter, and he rearranged his schedule just so he could come back and do these days. He was just so lovely to work with. We were very lucky.”
It sounds like it was a fortunate production all the way through. Did they have any disasters?
“It was incredibly hard,” Dusty says.
Madeleine nods. “Very challenging. On the very first day we were supposed to film the beginning and the end of the movie, but it was a torrential downpour and it was a storm, which looks amazing in the movie, but it's so hard to film walking into cold water.”
“Originally there was a three page dialogue scene that took place in the water,” says Dusty. “When we got there, we realised there was no way we were going to be able to shoot this scene in the water. So we were sitting in a little tent on the beach and the wind was blowing the tent around and we rewrote the whole thing.”
“A lot of the film is outside and we were filming during a pretty wet, cold autumn, and we were in the wilderness for a lot of those exterior shots,” says Madeleine. “We were by waterfalls and caves and bluffs. Those conditions can make the whole process of filmmaking quite challenging.”
On top of that, there were seven hours of prosthetics for one character, Dusty reveals.
“Yeah, and there's fire,” says Madeleine. “All that stuff is always really tricky. It was important to us to do everything practically, to go back to what it was like to make a film in the Seventies, and adopting similar filmmaking techniques. We’re just such huge fans of those types of body horror films of the era where everything looks just as good as it did back then.”
Dusty cites The Elephant Man as an example, and they both agree that it still holds up today.
I ask if their experience of all these challenges means that they're going to be more cautious when writing their next film, but they shake their heads.
“It actually has made us more confident to do more crazy things because this was so intimidating for us,” Madeleine says. “And it was such a big step up from our last movie in terms of scope and mission and challenges. And having now done this, we have a little bit more money. It's exciting to try to do something we've not done.”
“We're definitely going to keep doing practical effects,” Dusty vows.
“Yeah. In fact, more challenging ones.”
They’re both very excited about having made it to Berlin. Madeleine says that it’s a dream.
“We both applied to Berlin with every single film we've ever made, and this is the first one that's been accepted, so it feels like a huge achievement,” Dusty says.
