If your husband suddenly takes you to a luxurious trauma retreat, where you experience haunting visions, feel worse by day, and hear whispered conversations behind closed doors, would you still trust him? Honey Bunch (Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli, 2025) takes us on a confusing ride through Diana’s (Grace Glowicki) world.
The therapy is baffling – indescribable food that’s supposedly good for memory loss, coarse sea salt under feet, metronome ticking and endlessly flashing strobe lights. We are forced to look into the flickering lights through Diana’s eyes and follow the camera circling around the maze (much like the one from The Shining [Stanley Kubrick, 1980]) from above until dizziness completely takes us over. Much like Diana, we start to feel fuzzy and light-headed, and we feel manipulated.
Yet everything is so wonderfully beautiful. Tiffany lamps from Art Nouveau, hazy forests, delicate utensils and soft diffused lights. The retreat centre is a tad bit too posh and becomes unsettling, but at least the scenes are always nice to look at. Diana develops strange connections with a portrait and starts to have horrifying hallucinations about the subject. Meanwhile, Diana’s husband, Homer (Ben Petrie), showers her with affection and assures her she is actually getting better. Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie no doubt have excellent chemistry, not only from frequent collaborations (Her Friend Adam [Petrie, 2016], Tito [Glowicki, 2019], and The Heirloom [Petrie, 2024]) but also a real-life partnership.
Thankfully Diana is not stupid. After witnessing the painful incidents of another patient (India Brown), she is determined to make her escape. The truth turns out to be unexpected, yet strangely fitting for this year’s festival, with connections to one of the most anticipated films. Don’t think too hard about it – the secret was already given away in the title, but the ensemble’s (Jason Isaacs, Kate Dickie, Julian Richings, and Patricia Tulasne) chilling performances make this film a hypnotising experience. Unfortunately, the overuse of consecutive zoom-ins draws too much attention to the editing. Perhaps it’s yet another way to disorient and drain us into a muddled state, where there are no longer distinctions between hallucinations and memories.
With a husband called Homer, it’s hard not to make connections to Greek mythology. Beneath the horror, Honey Bunch is essentially a futuristic tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, or Sisyphus’s attempts to cheat death. This time it might not result in God’s punishments, but this journey should be enough warning for us to never trust guys called Homer again (of which the Greek Sophist Dio Chrystostom would certainly approve).
Ariadne is a film writer specialising in sensory and arthouse cinema.