Review by Ben Bussey
Damn it all, it’s another of those films that’s very, very easy to talk about if you don’t mind giving everything away, but considerably trickier if you’d like to leave things unspoiled. Taking what would seem to be a fairly standard trope from horror/sci-fi fantasy, yet playing it out in an unusually intimate, grounded and character-based manner, Honeymoon has gathered much praise as one of the most unconventional and attention grabbing genre films to have surfaced on the 2014 festival circuit – where I managed to miss it. Catching up now ahead of its UK DVD/Blu-ray release, I’m happy to concur that this praise has been very much deserved – although, not unlike another of last year’s most talked-about genre films Under The Skin (to which Honeymoon has been compared), this is not a film for those who like to have everything spelled out for them in black and white.
As to just what makes Honeymoon so ‘unusually intimate’ – that’ll be the fact that, aside from a couple of brief scenes, literally the only people on screen are our two central protagonists, New York newlyweds Bea (Rose Leslie – let’s just say “you know nothing, John Snow” now and get it over and done with) and Paul (Harry Treadaway – no catchphrase that I’m aware of). Straight away it seems an odd choice to cast two British actors in American roles, and for the first couple of scenes I did fear it would impede proceedings as neither of their accents is exactly spot-on; and yet, given that we spend all but a few minutes of the film in the company of these two alone, a certain verisimilitude sinks in soon enough – and in a curious kind of way, the fact that neither actor is actually American feeds into the film’s core theme of whether or not everyone is who they claim to be (much as I’ve often felt may be the case with Tim Roth’s casting in Reservoir Dogs).
Paul and Bea are living the newlywed dream. Madly in love, their every conversation is peppered with in-jokes, stock responses and reactions; these are two people utterly in tune with one another, and when they head out for their honeymoon in (first alarm bell) Bea’s family’s lakeside cabin in the woods, it’s clear they intend to savour their time together. The first seeds of doubt are sown by a somewhat tense encounter with a guy Bea used to know from childhood summers in the area, whose seemingly terrified wife warns them it’s not safe to be there. Of course, no one heeds the warning of a crazy person, so Bea and Paul head straight back to the cabin – then in the middle of the night Paul finds himself alone in bed. Unable to find Bea anywhere in the house, sleepy annoyance gradually gives way to outright panic, until he finds Bea outside in the pitch darkness, standing naked in the woods. Dismissing it as a random sleep-walking incident, Bea insists she’s fine – and yet the next day she seems strangely out of sorts, forgetting little things like how to make breakfast properly. As time goes on and Bea’s behaviour becomes more uncharacteristic, Paul is driven to find out just what happened to her in the woods that night – and whether it has something to do with the mysterious lights that have been washing over their windows in the dead of night.
I won’t say any more on the nature of what is happening to our characters, partly as I don’t want to spoil anything and partly because it is, indeed, left fairly ambiguous. Taking a step back, what Honeymoon seems to be dealing with most directly are the basic fears of anyone entering into a marriage; specifically, the fear that becoming a spouse equates to loss of one’s individuality, no longer being the person you were before. This might seem particularly true for a new wife, still typically expected to adopt her husband’s surname and as such take on what many would call an inherently subservient position. The fact that this is a female-directed film – and a major calling card for Leigh Janiak – might draw particular attention to the gender politics at play, as it’s material which, handled just a little differently, might potentially have come off a bit misogynistic, given that it’s the wife character who undergoes the change, after which proceedings play out primarily from the husband’s perspective.
Happily, Honeymoon never lapses into predictable Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, monstrous feminine territory. Treadaway’s Paul does not fear for himself around his somehow changed wife; he only fears that he may have lost the one he loves. This, of course, is another of the key fears for anyone entering into a marriage: how do you deal with it if you give yourself over so completely to another person, and you end up losing them? As Bea’s memory worsens, some scenes play out almost as Alzheimer’s analogies, and it’s all so beautifully acted, handled in such a believable and emotive fashion that – as absurd as the apparent explanation might be – you can’t help but take it all entirely seriously. Even so, Honeymoon never forgets that it’s a horror movie. The sense of steadily building dread never lets up from the moment Paul first wakes up alone in bed, but it isn’t the simple, tangible fear of the masked maniac or the fanged beast waiting in the woods; it’s the altogether trickier, primal fear of simply not knowing what’s going on, what is waiting out there for you, or indeed what is inside with you already. But in case that sounds a bit too oblique, fear not – there are a few great ‘ick’ moments in store as well.
It really warms the heart looking up Leigh Janiak on IMDb and seeing she has four times as many credits as ‘assistant’ than she does as writer-director. Just goes to show, taking those not-so-glamorous, starting-at-the-bottom film industry jobs can indeed pay off. The real beauty of Honeymoon is that, while it must surely have been a low budget production, it never looks cheap; and while keeping the cast size so minimal must also have been at least in part a budgetary decision, this never seems like a corner-cutting measure. Small-scale two handers with minimal locations often wind up feeling like poorly adapted stage plays, yet Honeymoon is thoroughly filmic from start to finish, taking full advantage of the beautiful locations and, naturally, making sure its stars look great – even whilst dragging them through the proverbial mud. We should damn well hope Leigh Janiak never serves as anyone else’s assistant again after this, and celebrate the arrival of another unique voice in horror filmmaking from whom we can but hope further such delights are on the horizon.
Honeymoon is available now for digital download, and is released to Blu-ray and DVD on 26th January 2015, from Arrow Films.