Honeycomb

It’s the last summer after school is over and before the girls split up to go to college and begin their adult lives. The sun is bright. The air is fresh. They’re bored of waiting around for boys. When they acquire a rambling old house in he middle of nowhere, they decide to move out there to live by themselves for a while, making their own rules and enjoying their freedom.

There’s a well established set of expectations surrounding films like this, even at the likes of Fantasia, and director Avalon Fast plays into them to begin with, showing us the girls laughing a waving their arms as they drive along a quaint forest road towards their new adventure. We see the sunlight in their hair, hear they laughter. Soon they will be running through the long grass together, all dressed in white. The boys, who provide a sort of Greek chorus as events unfold, will speculate as to whether they are really all in love with each other. But this isn’t a film about boys, or men’s interpretations of independent female life. It’s a film about people, and all the dangerous things of which people are capable.

“Don’t pray for serenity, pray for chaos,” one of the girls advises. But there are rules – there have to be rules. They don’t want simmering resentments or cliqueiness to undermine their fun. So they make a list of principles by which they will abide, the most important one being ‘suitable revenge is accepted’, which means that if one girl is hurt by another, she can do something which causes equivalent hurt in response, and no-one will hold that against her. As a focal point for their new beliefs, the girls create a shrine with candles, mirror and assorted pretty things, underneath a painting they find in the house, of a woman crowned with bees.

Jules, Vicky, Leader, Millie and Willow, joined in due course by Willow’s little sister, June. They all wear red dresses to engage in a ceremony, or go exploring dressed in shades of blue. The landscape is idyllic. The humour is carefully balanced. Somehow, as a group of young women living together, they spontaneously acquire cats. The boys are driven over, blindfolded, for parties which Fast shoots in collage style. The soundtrack mixes up the songs they love with short bursts of sweeping melody. To the girls, it’s all fun and games even after somebody loses an eye.

The horror enters the story abruptly, recedes, surges up again. It is less about specific brutal acts (which are implied rather than shown in all their gory detail) than about the breakdown of moral values which occurs incidentally in this liberated, transformative space. Cinema’s tributes to the beauty of girls this age have often linked them with the natural world, and Fast does likewise, but with a more comprehensive understanding of what the natural world is like. Their innocence is that of animals who do what they do and give it no further thought. Paying attention to the little things will alert you to what is to come; the details come together like swarming bees; the girls, perceived as weak when alone, have power as a group but are dangerously inexperienced in wielding it.

Fast’s fresh, naturalistic shooting style combines here with dialogue which is studiously artificial and sometimes surreal. This, together with the carefully stylised performances, has led to criticism from some people who don’t seem to understand what the film is aiming for. Yes, the low budget shows in places, but the film’s abruptness has more to do with its stylistic, as well as thematic, rejection of conformity. This is closer in tone to a Passion play than to cinema’s established, romantic girls-at-play tradition. These young women are not here to entertain. They are getting on with the serious and serene process of establishing order in a chaos of their own making.