Honey Bunch is directed by Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli, and the cast includes Grace Glowicki, Ben Petrie, Jason Isaacs, Kate Dickie and India Brown.
My Thoughts on Honey Bunch
There’s a moment early in Honey Bunch where a man carries a woman from her wheelchair into the ocean, where he kisses her, whispers that he loves her, and then - presumably - submerges her completely.
That sets the tone for the rest of the film - something that is constantly on the edge between horrifying and absurd, serious and ridiculous, and not particularly interested in letting you feel comfortable.
The film then introduces Diana and Homer, played by Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie, driving through the woods toward a specialized institute for people with traumatic head injuries, because Diana has been in a coma, her memory fragmented, and her recovery includes both physical therapy and mental exercises, and the mansion where she will stay is Gothic, and completely uninviting.
The forest outside the mansion is quite lush and beautiful, ending at a cliff with a waterfall that has more significance than you realize until much later
Glowicki and Petrie carry the film in ways that are offbeat and strangely modern, as they don’t feel like archetypes, which is impressive given how much the narrative leans on familiar horror tropes.
Homer is the steady, understated companion, while Diana drifts between lucidity and disorientation, and I did enjoy the way the performances make the narrative tricks - time jumps, disappearing characters, hallucinations - believable.
Without them, the story would collapse under its own ambition, but with them, I was willing to follow wherever it went, even when it got a bit confusing, and it does get confusing, because time in Honey Bunch is unreliable.
Diana can be sitting in a bathtub in daylight and suddenly snap to total darkness, Homer will leave a room and return in ways that feel like either seconds or hours, and shadows move where they shouldn’t, and sometimes figures appear in windows or doorways, and while I didn’t always understand what I was seeing, I liked that it mirrors Diana’s experience without feeling manipulative.
The pacing on Honey Bunch is slow, especially the first half, where the story spends a lot of time laying groundwork - Diana’s therapy sessions, the mysterious history of the doctor’s wife, the odd interactions with other patients - and some of it dragged, particularly when the filmmakers set up potential scares that never go anywhere, but these moments also add to the atmosphere.
The filmmakers clearly love ’70s horror aesthetics too, as we get soft lights, quick zooms, and long, diffuse shots that recall European psychological horror from that era, and it's all visually striking, but occasionally it felt like style over substance, but to be fair, the stylistic choices reinforce the film’s themes.
They make the mansion feel labyrinthine, the forest threatening, and Diana’s mental state increasingly untrustworthy, and even small details add to the feeling that you are never entirely safe in this story.
About halfway through, the film pivots though, and while it’s not a twist in the traditional sense, but everything you think you understand begins to shift, where Homer and Diana are not entirely who you believed them to be, and the story starts to explore the psychological and emotional stakes in a way that echoes the darkness of the filmmakers’ previous work - both emotionally complex and narratively ambitious, where some of the hallucinatory sequences are genuinely disturbing.
I did find it a frustrating film though, as some narrative threads feel like poor red herrings, where not every mystery resolves neatly, but it is a film willing the film is to take risks, to let its characters and story wander into strange and uncomfortable spaces without apologizing.
By the end, most of the pieces come together, where the second half transforms the story, making the film feel richer than it initially appears, as the way the narrative loops back on itself, revisiting moments from earlier in the film with new context.
Honey Bunch is not an easy film to watch though, and it’s not always an easy film to follow, so if you do watch it, don't be scrolling your phone at the same time, as it demands your full attention, because you really need to spend time in its strange, unsettling world because there’s a lot to look at, listen to, and interpret.
Yes, it's a bumpy ride, but I found it rewarding enough - it’s a puzzle, a mind-bender, and a slow-burn horror story wrapped in layers of psychological complexity, where the aesthetic choices, the performances, and the willingness to destabilize the viewer all combine to create a film that isn’t content to be easily digested.