Nasty, Bizarre and Dripping with Style, Honey Bunch Is an Inscrutable Fever Dream

Some films have tones that are unintentionally difficult to parse. Others, like Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli’s opaque ‘70s throwback mystery thriller Honey Bunch, essentially weaponize the fact that the audience doesn’t know quite how to approach them as a tool to keep those viewers out of balance for almost the entire runtime. Here, the sophomore filmmaking duo (after 2020’s unsettling Violation) has presented us with a truly odd curio: thrilling but ponderous, darkly comedic but genuinely disturbing, thoughtful but deeply silly, and 100% weird at all times. It doesn’t all work, and can even become grating in its initial refusal to let us in on what kind of game it’s actually playing, but by the time it ends, Honey Bunch earns both a grudging respect and admiration for its candor and chutzpah.

Diane and Homer (Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie, themselves a real-life couple) are a married duo attempting to heal from a traumatic upheaval that has seemingly put their future together in jeopardy. Following a violent car wreck, Diana is left with chronic pain, weakness and vast memory lapses, spurring Homer to enroll her in the program operated by an experimental trauma center deep in the wooded wilderness. The stage is set for a paranoid thriller in the vein of Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness: What is the true nature of the physical, mental and pharmacological “therapy” sessions (intense strobe light warning for epileptics) that Diana is undergoing in this place? What sinister, ulterior motives might be possessed by Homer, or the enigmatic head of therapy, Farah (Kate Dickie)? And just how many hallucinations and how much requisite gaslighting will we be sitting through?

At least, that’s the outline that Honey Bunch suggests, but the truth of it is considerably stranger, starting with our central duo. Just seeing the glimpses we have of them prior to the accident reveals quite an oddball dynamic–a seemingly adoring husband who is effusive with his love and desperate for affirmation, and a doubting wife who can’t bring herself to mirror all his unearned “I love you” utterances, always feeling like the other shoe is still yet to drop. Their characterization develops through free-flowing, surprisingly bawdy conversations in these flashbacks, melding legitimate philosophical pondering on topics such as passion/desire vs. “devotion,” with sprinkled references to droopy boobs, nipples and “prolapsed anuses,” to directly quote Diana. It’s not the kind of dialogue one typically hears delivered in a film aspiring to suspense, but then again, Honey Bunch is its own beast, right down to the intense film grain effect, clearly meant to evoke ‘70s psychological horror classics like Don’t Look Now. The film is in fact peppered with references to both this cinematic era and the ones that preceded it, from The Stepford Wives being namechecked, to Diana and Homer literally quoting Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca to each other at one point.

And yet Honey Bunch doesn’t really feel like those references, and what it does feel like often refuses to stay consistent. At one moment, you might be reminded of a Jordan Peele-esque social horror film; at another, the silliest side of Yorgos Lanthimos; at another the fever dream of Too Many Cooks, rapidly spiraling into ironic madness. Gross-out moments–an incredibly grisly shot of a nurse drilling into a skull for brain surgery–are supported by a few genuinely shocking jump scares, but five minutes later the tone has morphed into absurdist relationship humor. Coupled with the heavily stylized look of the place–a palatial estate slowly being enveloped by the woods, bathed in sunlight and warm colors–it all reeks of atmosphere. You look at the screen and wonder how anyone on it could breathe, because the air feels like it would be so thick as to be suffocating. As it ping-pongs between disturbing material and nasty humor, I find myself thinking, “This is what a psychological thriller presented by Adult Swim might look like.”