HONEYMOON (2014)

Studio:       Magnet Releasing
Director:    Leigh Janiak
Writer:       Phil Graziadei, Leigh Janiak
Producer:  Patrick Baker, Esme Howard
Stars:     Rose Leslie, Harry Treadaway, Ben Huber, Hanna Brown

Review Score:

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Summary:

While honeymooning at a secluded cabin in the woods, a young husband comes to suspect that his new wife may not be who he thinks she is.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Newlyweds Bea and Paul spend their honeymoon at a remote cabin in the woods owned by Bea’s family. While the couple sleeps during the first night, a bright light shines through their bedroom window.

Bea and Paul walk to a nearby restaurant. The lone employee, Will, angrily tells the couple that the business is closed before realizing that Bea is a childhood friend he knew as Trixie. Seemingly distracted, Will says that his wife Annie’s family owns the restaurant. Behaving strangely, Annie appears and warns Bea and Paul to leave. Will explains that Annie is not herself while Paul perceives Will’s affection for Bea.

Paul wakes before dawn to go fishing and finds Bea missing from their bed. Paul searches the darkened forest and discovers his wife naked. Bea offers sleepwalking as an explanation for her disappearance.

The next morning, Bea begins exhibiting signs of forgetfulness, as though struggling to remember how to do things like making food or speaking properly. Paul also finds small wounds on Bea’s legs that she tries passing off as mosquito bites. As Bea’s behavior grows increasingly strange, Paul becomes more worried about what might be happening to his wife.

Paul finds Bea’s torn negligee in the woods. He returns to the cabin to find Bea rehearsing how to speak to him in the mirror. When she repeats the same lines to him later, Paul asks again about what happened in the woods, fostering another argument between the couple.

Lights beam through the cabin windows again later that evening. Paul sees a shadow shifting in the darkness when he searches outside and fires a shotgun into the air. Wondering if his wife might have had some sort of encounter with Will, Paul confronts Bea with the torn nightgown and asks whose footprints he found next to hers in the woods, as well as who might be stalking them outside the cabin. Bea pleads with Paul to stop his continued questioning.

Bea tries explaining odd vaginal bleeding as having her period. Unable to get straight answers from his wife about what is going on, Paul searches for Will at the restaurant. Paul finds Annie instead. He notices that Annie has the same marks on her legs as Bea. Annie cryptically warns Paul to “stay away from us … we’re not safe … we will hunt you.” Annie then takes a boat out onto the water while Paul finds Will’s baseball cap floating near the pier. Paul also finds a computer in the restaurant and watches surveillance camera footage of Annie being lured outside by bright lights. Pages of writing practice repeating personal facts indicate that Annie and Bea share the same affliction.

Paul goes back to the cabin and confronts his wife about her true identity. Bea locks herself in the bathroom. Paul breaks in to find Bea forcibly attempting to remove something from her womb. Following a struggle, Paul ties Bea to their bed. Paul then pulls a tendril-like alien organism from inside Bea.

Bea admits that “something bad” happened to her in the woods, describing an encounter with dark shapes attempting to get inside her. Bea continues explaining that she knows what they want and what she is supposed to do, but Paul is “not allowed” to know. She explains only that “they” are taking Bea and leaving the body behind, but Paul cannot fully understand.

A light beams in through the window. Entranced, Bea tells Paul that he is not needed and “they” will now get rid of him. Claiming that she must hide Paul in order to protect him, Bea knocks Paul unconscious.

Paul wakes to find himself tied with rope inside of a boat. Telling Paul that he must be hidden somewhere where he cannot be found, Bea throws over the anchor tied to Paul. Paul is pulled underwater and drowns. Her body undergoing a physical transformation, Bea returns to the cabin and watches her wedding video before being summoned outside once more by bright lights.

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Review:

Even before suspicions of infidelity, cold feet, and outright body snatching begin brewing, Bea and Paul’s honeymoon is already off to a pretty lousy start.  Paris or Hawaii might be cliché romantic getaway destinations, but what couple in their right mind would instead choose a dusty woodland cabin for making their first “just married” memories?

Whatever the reason, Bea and Paul’s post-ceremony plans involve a holiday at Bea’s old family cabin that she has presumably been to a million times before.  It’s the kind of creaky cottage that would barely be swank enough for a weekend kegger with college buddies, much less a proper kickstart to wedded bliss.  Nonetheless, while others celebrate their nuptials by sipping fine wines on white sand beaches, Bea and Paul are busy getting sunburns and sore arms from paddling a canoe and making all their own meals.

Bea and Paul are not exactly presented as cash-strapped young lovers with more affection than money between them, although there is little doubt about them being in love.  “Honeymoon” actually goes overboard in their introduction to the point where cute teeters towards obnoxious.

It may be necessary to show the new bride and groom as madly into each other in order to make the coming conflict more wrenching.  Yet husband and wife are splashed together in such liberal doses of overdramatized sweetness that it feels like a science experiment determined to force chemistry no matter what.

“Honeymoon” recovers from that laid on thick exposition thanks to outstanding performances from Harry Treadaway and Rose Leslie as the two leads.  In fact, independent filmmakers might take a memo: you don’t need headliner level names to carry a film, just reliable rising talent that can broaden a premise through quality acting.

Bea and Paul take a stroll down a dirt path to a questionably located restaurant that is somehow in business despite being in a remote forest outside of tourist season and without another soul remotely in sight.  There, the newlyweds run into Will, who had some sort of a past with Bea when the two were younger and vacationed in the area with their families.  Not to bring it up again, but awkward chance encounters with childhood crushes are far less likely when snorkeling in the Bahamas instead of roughing it in familiar woods for a honeymoon.

Will’s wife Annie behaves in a peculiar manner.  And Will acts oddly towards her.  This gives Bea and Paul their first clue that something might be amiss amongst the trees.

That night, bright lights sweep slowly across the cabin.  Paul wakes to discover that Bea is gone.  A frantic search uncovers Bea naked in the night without any recollection of how she got there.  With each passing day from there on out, Bea’s behavior grows gradually stranger.  Eventually, Paul comes to wonder if she is even still Bea at all.

This is the point where “Honeymoon” stamps the viewer’s passport to detach from the film.  When a bright beam of light summons a nude sleepwalker into dark woods and said somnambulist returns acting like a completely different person, there is not much mystery about what took place when you are watching a horror movie.

But Paul does not know he is starring in one.  So when he sees Bea’s demeanor morphing, he racks his brain with questions like, is she having second thoughts about marriage?  Is she hiding a dark secret from her past?  Is she rekindling an old flame with Will?

The trouble is, those questions place Paul far behind what the audience already suspects about the true origin of Bea’s affliction.  Which puts Paul alone in his struggle to grasp what is happening to his wife and to his marriage.  The audience ends up watching him passively instead of experiencing a maddening mystery alongside him.  With Bea now a possessed shell, that leaves the viewer without any hook into the fiction at all.

Much of the press around “Honeymoon” has made mention of underlying metaphors about how well one knows his/her spouse and the sacrifice of identity when entering a relationship.  Those can be heady concepts, but “Honeymoon” is too straightforward as a two-person terror tale to add satisfying depth to those ideas.

Bea’s situation is so clear in nature that intangible threads involving what might be changing her never ring as legitimate possibilities.  Paul may be futilely solving a puzzle he has crafted in his head, but there is never any real question about “Honeymoon” being much more than a body snatcher movie about physical metamorphosis.  Any subtext inferred comes from digging for something to interpret and not a conscious message that the movie promotes about the nature of trust and security.

Despite the miscues on social commentary and a slow-rolling first half, “Honeymoon” still manages to strike a sickly tone of eeriness.  Strong performances and a tense atmosphere go a long way towards counterbalancing the cerebral overreach and freshman faux pas of a first-time feature filmmaker.

With its simple focus on achievable results and an economic production, “Honeymoon” is the right project for director Leigh Janiak to cut her teeth on.  “Honeymoon” has its work cut out for it in rising to the top amongst the revival crop of recent body horror like “Almost Human” (review here), “Antiviral” (review here), “Contracted” (review here), and “Thanatomorphose” (review here).  But there is still an undeniable quality about its haunting mood that suggests Janiak is capable of turning in something even better on her next go.

Review Score:  60

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