“Honey Bunch“Begins-like recently” Companion “, with which the film by the Canadian director Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli (” Violation “) also has a few things in common-with a couple in a car. However, the path leads not to a holiday home for the holiday weekend among friends, but to a remote clinic for trauma patients, because Diana (Grace Glowicki) suffers from amnesia and other, supposedly shock -related functional disorders of the brain due to an accident.
What would happen if the consequences of the accident were irreversible, Diana asks and her devoted husband Homer (Ben Petrie). And anyway, how will it be in old age when it is ugly and sick and in need of care? Homer's insurance, he would take care of her under all circumstances, and his love was not tied to Diana's youth, beauty, health, or simply in the love of the moment in love.
The trauma clinic is not roughly reminiscent of an aristocratic horror estate from a classic creep film of past decades.
They are dialogues that are supposedly casually interspersed with the film, but which will be taken up again later. First of all, however, “Honey Bunch” deceives something that he will not go up in the end. Because with the arrival in the psychotherapeutic clinic, which works with very suspicious experimental methods and hanging in the direction of a classic ghost film in all rooms of a doctor who died under mysterious circumstances.
Diana experiences nightly hallucinations that nobody seems to see – but is it the secrets of the place? Or is it about flashbacks of her own memory, which, as it is initially called, no longer knows how to distinguish between the past and the present, memory and current perception? And where exactly does Homer go when she wakes up alone at night?
The shards of memory
It is very commendable that Fewer-SIMs and Mancinelli do not reach into the overturned jumpscare moth box when staging these hallucinations. Creepy are definitely these moments, also pronounced by an effectively scary sound design – but not in the very simple way that only frightens briefly instead of sustainable.
Basically, it is not even really 100 % clear whether we should fear before the figures that Diana appear in their visions – or whether Diana himself should be? Because even that does not necessarily seem to be scared and horror by the ghostly phenomena. Rather, you follow her with a desperate struggle to put the broken glass of her fragmented memory together into an understandable whole.
Joseph (Jason Isaacs) is also for therapy in the trauma clinic with his accident daughter Josephina (India Brown).
Of course, there must be a central twist in a story like this – a large unveiling that puts everything shown in a context and discloses the central secret of the film. And almost never succeeds in a film that this twist does not also have a touch of disappointment. Because in the end the true horror still arises in your own head, and rarely can rarely be brought to one point – the most terrible is always the feeling that in principle everything could only be imaginable (or: unimaginably) terrible, inevitably Always shrinks at the moment when a story is committed to a concrete terrible thing that it then says.
So it is not always so much on the twist itself in the Twist-heavy horror and thriller cinema, but on what the respective film does or after it. And it is precisely at this point that “Honey Bunch” is not just a solid, but a really good and even an original film. Because in itself the Twist itself is completely okay and at least not as expected as you may fear in between. But how it works in the film and what he triggers is actually remarkable, because what is finally unveiled after a very patient structure forces Diana to behave – and finally, in a reasonably abysmal and yet strangely touching way, one To make a decision …
Only the final is only really good for the film
In this final and the following epilog, “Honey Bunch” finds completely to yourself, and while one was not quite sure about long distances how much substance this atmospherically quite stylish retro horror film would actually have in the end, everything turns out to be Well thought -out, cleverly constructed game with genre conventions and expectations. Not on the plate, postmoderned species that only wants to lead you on the black ice in a circle, but in a strangely emotional, sincere way that actually prevails here in the abysses of a couple relationship.
Conclusion: Over long distances, the retro horror film of the director Fewer-Sims/Mancinelli looks like a perhaps something too conventional genre style exercise, somewhere between classic ghost history and “Gaslight” psychother. But far from it, because “Honey Bunch” not only has a plot twist beyond the very foreseeable one, but above all understands to develop something very idiosyncratic, abysmal and even touching from this twist. At the latest in the final third, he turns out to be a cleverly constructed and well -told film, which gets something new and own out of well -known genre motifs.
We saw “Honey Buch” as part of the Berlinale 2025, where it was shown as the Berlinale Special.