‘Honey Bunch’ review: Bold Canadian period genre from the makers of ’Violation’

Dirs/scr: Madeleine Sims-Fewer, Dusty Mancinelli. Canada. 2025. 113mins.

Right down to its final sudden zoom and misty anamorphic filter, the second characteristic by Canadian filmmaking duo Madeleine Sims-Fewer & Dusty Mancinelli is a scrumptious homage to the fashion and ambiance of Seventies frighteners like Don’t Look Now or The Wicker Man. Set in a dark nation home someplace deep within the Canadian countryside, this shape-shifting style movie does one thing very daring with its gauzy thrills and frills, embedding a debate in regards to the limitless energy of affection inside a tense and edgy psychological thriller.

A love letter to an age when you would really feel the hand turning the digital camera zoom

That will already be rather a lot, however this Berlinale Particular goes additional – maybe too far – in smuggling darkish humour into the combo in a ultimate part that might be a litmus check for audiences. Some could really feel that they’ve simply been offered a really fashionable shaggy canine story, others will take pleasure in that bait and swap. One factor is for positive: Honey Bunch has not one of the extremities of the administrators’ debut, the arthouse ultra-horror Violation which was picked up by specialist style streamer Shudder. That’s not an not possible route for Honey Bunch, however it’s extra more likely to be circled by genre-friendly indie retailers searching for titles to tempt voracious cine-literate viewers.

The movie emerges from an Ontario-based expertise pool that can be a community of associates. Administrators Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli and fellow actor-directors Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie, who take the lead roles right here, combine being inventive and life companions, and have made work that arises straight from this meld – amongst them Petrie’s award-winning 2016 brief My Good friend Adam. That’s going to be a fairly area of interest dataset for many viewers, however we are able to all benefit from the ease and intimacy of the rapport between digital camera, actor and materials.

After an odd, ritualistic beach-set prologue, we first start to piece collectively the story of married couple Diana (Glowicki) and Homer (Petrie) as they drive by means of a silent backwoods panorama. In ache, with extreme reminiscence loss, she’s recovering from some trauma – she was in a coma for a great whereas, it would transpire – and he’s taking her to a clinic run by a well-known physician whose unorthodox strategies have been recognized to work miracles.

In an enormous outdated mid-Seventies saloon automobile, in period-appropriate gown, the couple arrive at a mansion within the woods that would not be extra good. It’s a smaller, extra humble tackle the grand Norfolk villa of Losey’s The Go-Between or the Sussex nation home the place Jack Clayton’s The Innocents was filmed: there’s one thing by-product about its drained aping of the classical orders that resonates. And right here’s Kate Dickie, oozing creepy reassurance as Farah, the mysterious physician’s assistant, who welcomes confused Diana and doting Homer to this home of gloomy silences and antiquated medical expertise.

Epousing Diana’s perspective as she tries to retrieve her recollections, kind actuality from hallucination and make sense of why she’s beginning to really feel worse, not higher, Honey Bunch pushes the Gothic ambiance utilizing all of the methods in its interval toolbox. A sudden zoom to a mysterious face in an upstairs window, a pan to one thing unusual within the walled backyard with its formal maze, web curtains that intensify the hazy halo of what seems very very like an old-school diffusion filter. Why is Homer not there when she wakes up? Why is he spending a lot time with Farah, and what was he doing on that lily-strewn grave within the grounds? The arrival of two extra sufferers – Joseph (Jason Isaacs) and his daughter Jospehina (India Brown), who’s equally struggling a mind harm – preserve us guessing in regards to the motives of those that deliver their family members right here for remedy.

One thing a little bit nebbish, to not say Allenesque, about Petrie’s Homer and a touch of the interval parody (with its shades of Julie Christie) in Glowicki’s Diana opens up a little bit crack in our perception that it is a straight-up drama, one that’s widened by the dearth of any such distancing mechanism within the Isaacs/Brown perfomances, which possess a uncooked urgency. This can be deliberate – actually, an audacious late tonal shift turns that small fissure right into a crevasse which audiences are inspired to embrace.

The movie is a love letter to an age when you would really feel the hand turning the digital camera zoom (DoP Adam Crosby is clearly having the time of his life) and when each cinematic nation home got here bundled with a creepy groundsman (a pleasant flip from British-Canadian character actor Julian Richings). Composer Andrea Boccadoro runs with the remit in a soundtrack with shades of classic Pino Donaggio and gobbets of Goblin, whereas a gap music by the inimitable Ivor Cutler couldn’t be a greater tonal match for a movie that manages, by turns, to be each dour and hilarious.