Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli attend the premiere of their film Honey Bunch during the 75th Berlinale International Film Festival in February, 2025.Gerald Matzka/AFP/Getty Images
Every movie-making experience is a marriage in its own right – a relationship between an artist and their art that requires commitment, passion, honesty. There are couples who have even made films together – Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas, Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold, Sean Baker and Samantha Quan – and come out the other end stronger, both as filmmakers and partners. But what about those who have chosen to make films explicitly about, well, their own relationships?
That was the challenge that Canadian directors Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli faced while working on Honey Bunch. A hybrid of romance, drama, horror and sci-fi surreality, the film follows a couple (Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie, another real-life pair) who visit an experimental medical facility as their relationship threatens to fall apart into memory-addled madness. In many ways, the film is both a riff on the unbreakable bonds of love as it is a deeply strange deconstruction of the creative process – it asks whose voice is allowed to be heard, and whose story should take the lead.
Grace Glowicki stars as Diana in Honey Bunch, which follows a couple as they visit an experimental medical facility.Cat People/Elevation Pictures
After the film’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere this past September, and ahead of Honey Bunch’s theatrical release this weekend, Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli sat down with The Globe and Mail to talk about their behind-the-scenes chemistry.
This film feels like a departure from your debut feature, Violation, but perhaps not so much – it’s about a woman facing a terrifying truth and having to reckon with that, largely on her own. What was the germ of the idea here?
Madeleine Sims-Fewer: We had made a film, with Violation, where we were purging all of our trauma on the screen, and then after doing so, watching it over and over again. After that experience, we wanted to make something about love that we could watch over and over again and feel something warm inside, rather than just be horrified.
Dusty Mancinelli: It was born out of long conversations that we had over the years about our relationships with love, and a sort of rejection to the idea of a soulmate or someone who is perfectly compatible with you. Relationships take work and if you’re looking for longevity, then it’s about recognizing that love ebbs and flows.
Sticky Canadian romantic thriller Honey Bunch will do anything for love, but it won’t do that
What is the collaborative process like? Petrie and Glowicki spoke with me before the festival about what it takes to make art as a couple, but every relationship is, of course, different.
Mancinelli: It’s been evolving over the course of our projects. At the heart, it’s a process about respect and inspiration. Every story, every character, every conversation comes from us trying to learn how to empathize with each other and try to understand the other’s perspective.
Sims-Fewer: We’re never trying to homogenize. There’s a kind of radical honesty to the way we work with each other. Which can be tough at times and even kind of painful. But the painful truth is the best truth, in the end.
Mancinelli: We don’t mince words. We’re quite cutting with each other. I do try to create some boundaries between life and work.
Sims-Fewer: That’s healthy, but for me, I don’t have any. I put it all out there.
There are fascinating layers to this production, given that Glowicki and Petrie are a real couple, making this movie about a couple, directed by a couple.
Sims-Fewer: They came into it really early – we hadn’t written the script yet. We’d been following their careers forever and loved Grace’s film Tito, and thought they were both unique performers who are willing to take risks. We had them over for dinner and pitched the entire movie to them.
Mancinelli: We made dumplings to sweeten the deal.
Sims-Fewer: And the great thing was that, as we were writing it, we could develop the characters for them, with them in mind. It was just a very fruitful collaboration.
Mancinelli: The great thing about working with another couple is that there is a love there. There is trust and comfort. On set, even though everything was scripted, there’s a lot of room to explore because they are very comfortable in the moment to take risks, do different things. And there are moments in which you’re capturing, say, Ben just looking at Grace, and there is a real deep love that you can see in his eyes. That’s a magical moment.
Ben Petrie plays worried husband Homer alongside his real-life and onscreen wife Diana (Grace Glowicki) in Honey Bunch.Cat People/Elevation Pictures
You have a stacked Canadian cast, but then there’s British actor Jason Isaacs, who audiences might know best today from The White Lotus but I’ve been following since way before even his Harry Potter days. How did he get involved?
Mancinelli: We had already been filming and still hadn’t cast that character.
Sims-Fewer: It was a really tricky one to cast, and we’d send it to people who loved it and have these long meetings, and then they would book a TV show.
Mancinelli: Jason was always on the top of our list, but we were told, ‘Oh he’s not gettable. It’s a very small budget, he’s going to be too busy.’ And what happens is you can wait months for someone to get a response and you risk the entire production. So, we just sent him the script, we were filming, and then he connected with the character. His wife is from Canada, so there’s momentum on that end. But he just loves to work, and he’s very passionate as a performer.
Sims-Fewer: He had a trailer, but I never saw him even open the door to it. He was just always on set and loving it right away. I don’t know if I ever saw him use the bathroom.
Honey Bunch opens in select theatres Jan. 23.
This interview has been condensed and edited.