Sticky Canadian romantic thriller Honey Bunch will do anything for love, but it won’t do that

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Honey Bunch

Written and directed by Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli

Starring Grace Glowicki, Ben Petrie and Jason Isaacs

Classification N/A; 114 minutes

Opens in select theatres Jan. 23

If there can be such a genre as codependency cinema, then the past 12 months have delivered a curious wealth of just-can’t-quit-you movies. Following the Dave Franco/Alison Brie horror-comedy Together (which posited that true love involves the horrifying fusing together of bodies) and the three-way romcom Eternity (which forced its leading lady to choose between the man of her dreams and the man of her reality, forever and ever), the new Canadian romantic-thriller-horror-sci-fi concoction Honey Bunch examines the lengths that some people will go to ensure that love never dies.

But, as both the characters inside Honey Bunch and audiences of the film itself might discover, sometimes a relationship looks better on paper than it does projected in real life.

The film, which is set in an undefined time period that feels like an alt-universe 1977, opens with the lovey-dovey couple Diana (Grace Glowicki) and Homer (Ben Petrie) making their way to an isolated country estate, where physicians on the cutting-edge of health technology promise to heal Diana’s mind and body after a recent accident.

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As the couple tour around the rehab centre meeting fellow guests, including a distressed father named Joseph (Jason Isaacs) and his vaguely ill daughter Josephina (India Brown), it becomes immediately clear that not all is right in the facility. Especially when considering the shifty-eyed nature of the staff, which includes the compassionate but tense Farah (Kate Dickie) and her wiry underling Delwyn (Julian Richings).

Still, it takes unnecessarily long for writers-directors Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli to reveal the true nature of Diana’s injury and Homer’s intentions to “cure” it – by which point the mystery of Honey Bunch has been stretched past intrigue into something more frustrating. The filmmakers have taken great pains to cloak and slather their story with the stylistic trappings of a 1970s psychological thriller – the influences of Dario Argento and Ken Russell linger in every nook and cranny of the film’s pseudo-hospital – but the surreal absurdity of it all doesn’t quite add up. The grand and purposefully chaotic final act is simply too unwieldy, the ending crying out for a more carefully constructed jaw-dropper.

How to make a Canadian movie as a couple and not split up along the way

There is, though, a fair and admirable dose of courage in Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli, a couple in art and life, using Honey Bunch to work through the growing pains and anxieties that any long-term romantic relationship faces – and all while being far less stomach-churning than their previous outing, the brutal 2021 horror film Violation. And there is a nifty doubling effect in the casting of the wonderful Glowicki and Petrie, another real-world pair, as Diana and Homer – two people who, while in love with one another, might not exactly have their best interests at heart. The entire film might be worth it for its final few seconds, during which Glowicki and Petrie push the boundaries of trust into exceptionally dangerous territory.

Still, I couldn’t help but leave the world of Honey Bunch hungry for something more. Glowicki and Petrie are immensely committed and often fearless performers – so much so that you can see them frequently bouncing against the constraints of the story surrounding them, the actors seemingly confident that if they pushed themselves just past the brink, the movie’s half-untapped potential might burst wide open. They are lovers in a dangerous time, certainly. But even they cannot kick at the darkness of this film till it bleeds daylight.