Film

Pastiche Horror Wears Its Aesthetic Influence On Its Padded 1970s Shoulders To Both Juicy and Exhausting Effect

12 February 2026

There’s a common refrain about marriage that stipulates you’ll end up finding yourself in a myriad of new relationships throughout its lifespan. The person you marry is not the person they will be in twenty years. Hell, they’re not the same person they were yesterday. That proverb is doubly true for Diana and Homer (Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie, respectively), since the former is experiencing bouts of memory loss after a particularly nasty car accident, and the latter’s secretive behavior grows more unnerving by the hour.

Writer-directors Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer’s retro-inspired body horror romance Honey Bunch wears its influences on its billowing 1970s sleeves. Sometimes, the film is more intent on communicating its bonafides than it is on languishing in them, and the bulk of the film is hampered by its devotion to its body horror revival aesthetic. But there’s an eerie calm to the terror that sets it apart, with Adam Crosby’s camera lingering on the odd bucolic tranquility of a place whose beautiful surface belies a strange insidiousness.

Were it not for a commanding central performance by Glowicki, a lot of Honey Bunch would feel tediously derivative. In substance, the film hews too close to the vein of A Cure for Wellness, Unsane or even Shutter Island; all movies which mine their tension from a constant question of a character’s sanity. But the film sharply changes course about halfway through, a transition from kooky medical facility to a more gnarly allegorical treatise on the constantly shape-shifting face of marital relations.

Diana has been brought to this secluded, beautiful Victorian estate somewhere in the Canadian wilderness by her husband as a desperate Hail Mary. After some time in a coma, her memory has been spotty at best, and she relies on a cane to compensate for a damaged hip. Conversation between the two is chummy but stilted, with frequent playful tiffs that suggest deep cracks in the foundation.

At this facility, they are greeted by Farah (Kate Dickie), whose thick Scottish brogue and beaming smile make her the Platonic ideal of a creepily, deceptively nice medical care professional, who the couple compares to Mrs. Danvers. Nothing seems terribly wrong here, at first, except that the supposed miracle worker of a doctor is nowhere to be found, and much of the moment-to-moment care is difficult to decipher. One procedure involves Diana sitting strapped to a chair in front of seizure-inducing lights. Her medication prescription requires rapidly titrated dosages of something that is supposed to help with her memory and her sleep.

But things get predictably weirder, with Diana stumbling upon multiple instances of slimy deformed women that look remarkably like herself, being treated and shouting out in agony. Stranger still, these visions seem to disappear. Stranger still, Diana witnesses a woman running away through the neighboring forest that no one acknowledges.

As Diana’s “treatments” progress, and she grows more and more suspicious of Homer’s intentions, the film risks exhausting itself quickly in its own mystery box. There’s not a ton of direction for the filmmakers to go after its initial set-up, and it isn’t until the film’s final, electric final act, that it regains its footing as something wholly distinct. With its sepia-toned film stock and discordant score, Honey Bunch can frequently feel more like pastiche than as a genuine film. It’s to the actors’ credit that it works when it does, and what it ultimately posits about marriage is as grossly haunting as it is disturbingly poetic.