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

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

All the way down to its final sudden zoom and misty anamorphic filter, the second function by Canadian filmmaking duo Madeleine Sims-Fewer & Dusty Mancinelli is a scrumptious homage to the model and environment of Seventies frighteners like Don’t Look Now or The Wicker Man. Set in a depressing 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 possibly can really feel the hand turning the digicam zoom

That may already be quite a bit, however this Berlinale Particular goes additional – maybe too far – in smuggling darkish humour into the combination in a last part that will probably be a litmus check for audiences. Some could really feel that they’ve simply been bought a really trendy shaggy canine story, others will get pleasure from that bait and swap. One factor is for certain: 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 in search of titles to tempt voracious cine-literate viewers.

The movie emerges from an Ontario-based expertise pool that can also 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 artistic and life companions, and have made work that arises immediately from this meld – amongst them Petrie’s award-winning 2016 quick My Buddy Adam. That’s going to be a reasonably area of interest dataset for many viewers, however we are able to all benefit from the ease and intimacy of the rapport between digicam, 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 a silent backwoods panorama. In ache, with extreme reminiscence loss, she’s recovering from some trauma – she was in a coma for whereas, it’ll 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 a giant previous mid-Seventies saloon automobile, in period-appropriate costume, 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 spinoff 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 standpoint as she tries to retrieve her reminiscences, kind actuality from hallucination and make sense of why she’s beginning to really feel worse, not higher, Honey Bunch pushes the Gothic environment utilizing all of the tips 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, internet curtains that intensify the hazy halo of what seems to be 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 – maintain us guessing in regards to the motives of those that convey their family members right here for therapy.

One thing a bit of 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 bit of crack in our perception that this can be 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 possibly can really feel the hand turning the digicam 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 tune 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.