★★★
An uncanny marital mystery set in a half-remembered 1970s, where love and control blur at a wellness retreat, until nothing can be trusted.
Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli, the pair behind Violation, return to questions of trust and control, this time inside a medical-gothic horror where care and coercion go hand in glove.
Grace Glowicki plays Diana, waking from a coma with her memory scattered. Her husband Homer (Ben Petrie) brings her to a secluded clinic called Retrouvailles, French for “reunion.” There she begins to piece herself together alongside another patient, Josephina (India Brown), whose father Joseph (Jason Isaacs) is deeply devoted to her. (Although A Cure For Wellness fans will know that no spa is safe from his presence.) The institute looks calm from the outside but hums with unease, and the staff’s warmth never quite lands.
The 1970s setting is carried mostly by surface detail, the cars and the haircuts and a slightly muddy palette, although some of the technology has a strangely 90s feel to it. The sense of place is similarly off: it seems to be set somewhere near the Canada-Scotland borderlands. Within this, Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli tell their story through texture and repetition: the hum of machines, the measured pace of therapy, the slips where memory turns to dream. The plotting is elliptical, with twist revelations arriving as recovered memories. The wigs are an absolute menace; weapons-grade bad. Each time the camera zooms in on one it threatens to puncture the spell.
Kate Dickie, as ever, radiates unease. Even from third billing, she defines the atmosphere; it is unmistakably Dickie-core, all wary eyes and softly lilting control. Julian Richings appears briefly but memorably, but Glowicki holds the centre with brittle anxiety.
The first hour hums with promise. Dread builds slowly, the editing toys with memory gaps, and the atmosphere tightens. The characters explicitly raise the spectre of The Stepford Wives: Is that what’s going on here? our poor heroine playfully enquires. But when the story finally needs to erupt into madness, it never quite gets there. The filmmakers reach for delirium and touch something closer to a melancholy silliness. The ultimate revelations had me sighing “it wouldn’t work like that,” despite trying to suspend disbelief. But what remains is interesting, a cold and elegant study of love curdled by control, even if the full riotous fever that’s occasionally promised never arrives.
Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli continue to explore how power works inside intimacy, how love can slide toward possession, and how healing can become a form of harm. Honey Bunch may not match the raw intensity of Violation, but despite its flaws it has some good ideas and carries the easier film’s emotional intelligence into stranger and dreamier territory.
Honey Bunch plays at the 2025 London Film Festival.
Whitlock&Pope 