Don't look now but I think he's smothering you
dirs. Madeline Sims-Fewer & Dusty Mancinelli
2026
This film doesn’t feel like it was ‘produced’, or extruded by any kind of machine or blind process: it feels like it was made, created, crafted by people who wanted to carefully put something specific together.
It’s not a feeling I always get when I’m watching movies, because most of them feel and look like everything else you’ve seen before in order to not scare the horses, mostly. And mostly what that results in is movies that go down smooth and easy and are barely memorable afterwards.
Honey Bunch is not one of those movies that I will forget easily. A movie that starts with a song from a weirdo Scottish polymath like Ivor Cutler, called I Worn My Elbows to the Bone, for You, is going to be a memorable entry into a film’s world.
And what a disturbing world it is. We see a man push a wheelchair with his disabled beloved towards the waves, and then carry her into the water, for no good purpose, we imagine, despite the fact that he tells her “I love you” when it looks like he’s going to drown her.
From grim beginnings grim things grow. In sunnier times that same husband, Homer (Ben Petrie) is driving some 70s station wagon to some country place. His wife Diana (Grace Glowicki) wakes in the passenger seat, unsure of what’s going on, which will persist for about the next hour.
There is reference made to an accident, there are hopes expressed about someone finally being able to help her with her issues, and all of it seems like the creepy set up to countless horror flicks where someone tries to do something terrible to a woman.
When they meet the main person who seems to run the show, called Farah (Kate Dickie), things only seem to become even more ominous, because, well, if you’ve seen Kate Dickie in stuff before, her appearance is always a cause for concern.
Kate Dickie has been in a million things, but for me when she played Lysa Arryn way back in the day, in Game of Thrones, it sealed the deal for me for a certain type of typecasting that meant whenever I am to see her pop up in something again, I’m naturally going to think she’s up to terrible, terrible things. It’s not Kate Dickie’s fault that Lysa Arryn’s actions in that show caused every action that followed, eight years of butchery and misery for hundreds of thousands of people, but it’s not something easy to forget, just like the image of her breastfeeding her appalling teenaged son.
Here she’s all smiles and reassurance with her Scottish brogue so sharp and thick that you could cut through a haggis with it, constantly telling Diana that everything will be okay as long as she believes in the process and accepts that Dr Trephine (Patricia Tulasne) is a genius who can cure every malady she puts her mind to.
It doesn’t help Diana’s state of mind that every room of the building they’re staying in seems to possess a painting of an unhappy woman in it glaring at the viewer. We are told, helpfully, that the paintings were painted and given as a birthday gift annually, but they seem more like a punishment, though we don’t know for whom.
Diana right off the bat starts seeing things and losing time, things that we assume might not be there. She has, after all, suffered a traumatic brain injury, and this place is meant to be an experimental medical type place that specialises in helping with just this type of trauma. It doesn’t help, though, that Diana keeps seeing the woman from the paintings everywhere, as well as these tortured, moaning people everywhere, and these continuously unsettling tableaus.
The sound design really helps to maintain the aura of unreality, but it’s really the cinematography that does the hard yards in both keeping the viewer off kilter and extending the strangeness of what we imagine Diana is going through.
For the longest time we’re unsure as to whether she’s an unreliable observer of her own experiences. Plenty of clues are given that what she thinks is going on might not be, but people are clearly lying to her as well. Homer seems to flit in and out of her presence, doing stuff she’s not privy to and having conversations with the staff that she can’t hear.
It’s enough to make a lady paranoid.
They joke early on about Farah having a Mrs Danvers kind of demeanour, from that other classic of gaslighting women, no, not Gaslight, but Daphne du Maurier’s classic Rebecca rendered famously into filmic form with Joan Fontaine and Sir Laurence Olivier in the main roles. Of course Mrs Danvers, the one they’re referencing, was played memorably by, don’t you know, Australia’s Own Judith Anderson.
But I remember her as being austere and forbidding as she terrorised the second Mrs de Winter, and eventually set fire to Manderley, whereas Farah is nice and polite at all times, extolling the virtues of the deep love Dr Trephine and her beloved Joan shared which has permeated into the very bones of the building. She’s intense, but she’s ever so supportive, especially of people in love. She loves love, don’t you see?
And what of love? The love between Diana and Homer? Can she trust it, can we trust it?
Um, no. Homer, for all his doting and fluttering over Diana does not seem on the up and up. And, from what we start to gather are memories that Diana watches play out in front of her, their relationship before the accident was no picnic.
And when a father (Jason Isaacs) so emphatic and toxically positive and his damaged seeming daughter Josephina (India Brown) turn up, and Homer and that dad seem to already know each other and exchange some terse but supportive words, we get the further impression that something is not right with how these women are being treated.
Something is being done to them, and they don’t know what it is.
I mean, yes, this is a film, and not just another woman’s experience with the health system as it currently is, but we can’t help but see that much of the menace and paranoia we’re seeing through Diana’s eyes could be because of the patriarchy in general and the sexism of health services that saw women as appendages or dependents of their husbands or fathers, and not as autonomous beings entitled to make decisions about their own needs, specifically.
And that’s exactly what the film makers want us to think just so they can pull that rug from under our feet in a truly shocking fashion.
The actual explanation for what’s going on, damn, I can’t even get close to referring to its outlines. It’s so beyond the pale, and beyond anything any reasonable person could guess based on the setting, though I guess there are plenty of signposts and clues that only make sense in retrospect down the track.
But all the same, damn. I did wonder if it was something that was going to ruin my opinion of the flick, or my enjoyment of it, in the same way when Diana actually finds out / figures out what’s happening, she is not chill about it, let’s say. She is very less than chill.
Yet the film figures out an impossible path back to being emotionally resonant, and actually affirming something which I was sure its complications and twists thought unimportant, or secondary.
I was a fool. If this story works it only works if we buy that Homer and Diana care about each other or love each other enough, even as they fight over what that means. In those allegedly happier days pre-accident, they fought over how easily Homer would tell her he loved her, and how guarded Diana would be about saying it. She would argue that her love should be obvious through her actions, not empty vocalisations, and he argues that if it’s felt, it can be said, however cheap or easy it might seem to say it. Just saying it can mean something too.
It helps, it really helps that the two actors are married to each other. They have a weird energy in some scenes, so it feels like we’re watching an actual couple tense about something that might actually reasonably be something they’d fight about as opposed to the arch melodramatics that the thriller / mystery / meta aspects might provoke. Weird inside type jokes are meant to be slightly alienating but they can also be fascinating (for the viewer).
In the end, when they’re taunting each other about whether they’ll still look after each other no matter how decrepit or gross they become with age, it goes from being a throwaway remark or an actual escalation to being what the film ultimately is about, which is loving someone so much that you love every version of them that we come to know over time or through happenstance, none of which we get to choose. We don’t choose what terrible things happen to them (or us); we choose whether we stay with them through thick, thin, cancer, brain damage, memory loss or deep psychosis.
It perversely becomes so incredibly sweet and deeply moving in the end, when all I experienced in the first hour was discomfort and dread. It’s a hell of a ride. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
9 times people are always so reluctant to take pills in movies and I’m like “give me the pills, I’ll have all the pills” out of 10
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“Take courage, my heart. You’ve been through worse than this.” - Honey Bunch
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