Honey Bunch

Bluesky

Diana (Grace Glowicki) has adored Homer (Ben Petrie) since the first moment she set eyes on him. He’s her funny-looking guy. But does he feel the same way? She’s younger, more conventionally attractive. She knows those things were part of what attracted him to her. What will happen when she gets old? What if she gets ill? Will he still love her then? These thoughts haunt her. They argue in the car. It’s one of the last things she remembers.

After the accident, nothing is the same. Memory is fuzzy and she just doesn’t feel like herself. Homer, thankfully, is unscathed, and assures her that the new treatment will get her through it. As they approach the clinic, in a remote manor house surrounded by sprawling gardens, she sees a man helping an unsteady woman to leave. This is the 1970s, and she has visions of Stepford. Inside, a rather intense welcome from a woman (Kate Dickie) whom both she and Homer compare to Mrs Danvers adds to the tension, as do the portraits of the founder’s wife which watch over every room. “She looks so sad,” Diana remarks.

There are few other people at the clinic. Rest and relaxation are part of the treatment. When not in therapy sessions (which, viewers should be aware, feature heavy use of a strobe), Diana wanders through the house and grounds. She experiences hallucinations, but whether they stem from the accident or the cure is hard to say. In her surroundings and in her memories, little clues emerge which seem to tell her that something untoward is going on. Directors Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer make use of the language of Seventies horror films to take viewers where they want them to go – but where is that, exactly? All is not as it seems.

There’s a genuine unpredictability to Honey Bunch, both structurally and thematically, which makes it both more interesting and more valuable than most such tales, and probably contributed to it getting a place at the Berlin International Film Festival. It does interesting things with narratives around disability and the ways in which relationships change over time. The cast is outstanding, with the underappreciated Julian Richings as the Igor-like husband of Dickie’s character, and Jason Isaacs as the father of the clinic’s youngest patient, Josephine (played by capable newcomer India Brown). The different types of bonds between the characters enable the film to take on a number of difficult issues.

What really stands out about the story as it develops is that it maintains its appreciation of nuance, subverting clichés without pushing too hard in the opposite direction. It has none of the anti-science bias frequently present in the Gothic, but its answers are never easy. It’s a difficult story to pace and the filmmakers don’t always get that right, so that the middle section, in particular, feels uneven, but it’s worth bearing with it, and Adam Crosby’s lush cinematography will help you do that. The tremendous effort put into each detail of the house really pays off – fans of Mancinelli and Fewer-Sims will note a familiar abundance of rabbits. In the end, though, it’s the detail in the characters that really makes it shine.