Trust Is the Real Experiment

Read Time:5 Minute, 12 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Honey Bunch
–

Genre: Horror, Thriller, Sci-Fi
Year Released: 2025, 2026
Runtime: 1h 53m
Director(s): Madeleine Sims-Fewer, Dusty Mancinelli
Writer(s): Madeleine Sims-Fewer, Dusty Mancinelli
Cast: Grace Glowicki, Ben Petrie, Jason Isaacs, Katie Dickie
Where to Watch: streaming on Shudder February 13, 2026

RAVING REVIEW: What does it mean to help someone you love when the cost of that help is never defined? HONEY BUNCH has that question deeply embedded in its premise, then spends nearly two hours refusing to let the audience resolve it. Rather than positioning itself as a puzzle-box thriller or a pure body-horror production, the film commits to something more emotionally destabilizing: a love story in which devotion is both the pulse and the exposure.

Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli present HONEY BUNCH with a clear sense of authorship, building on the confrontational intimacy that defined their earlier work while shifting into a more overtly genre-facing space. The result is a film that wears the visual language of 1970s gothic horror, but uses that aesthetic as a delivery system rather than a gimmick. The isolated clinic, the ritualistic procedures, the framing of bodies under observation, all of it serves up emotional stakes first. This isn’t nostalgia cosplay. It’s an environment designed to trap both characters and viewers inside a shared moral uncertainty.

Grace Glowicki helps form the film's structure with a performance that never asks for sympathy yet commands it anyway. Her portrayal of Diana isn’t written as a passive victim of circumstance, even when her memory loss places her at an immediate disadvantage. Glowicki plays her with a sharp, reactive intelligence, someone who senses imbalance long before she can articulate it. That instinctive resistance becomes the film’s most reliable viewpoint, especially as the treatment process grows more invasive and the rules governing the facility remain intentionally opaque.

Opposite her, Ben Petrie delivers an unsettling performance in its restraint. Homer isn’t presented as a villain in any traditional sense, and that choice is crucial. The film is far more interested in exploring how love can become indistinguishable from control when framed as sacrifice. Petrie plays Homer as a man deeply convinced of his own righteousness, someone who believes that wanting the best for another person excuses almost anything. The danger is not that he lacks empathy, but that he has too much confidence in his interpretation of it.

Jason Isaacs and Katie Dickie round out the film’s central cast with performances that feel deliberately measured rather than showy. Isaacs, in particular, brings a practiced ambiguity to his role, projecting authority without warmth and care without transparency. The clinic staff aren’t caricatures or mad scientists. They’re professionals who have convinced themselves that outcomes matter more than consent, and the film never allows them the comfort of easy condemnation or absolution.

Where the film truly distinguishes itself is in how it handles body horror. Rather than leaning into shock or allegory, HONEY BUNCH treats physical transformation as an extension of emotional imbalance. The procedures are disturbing not because of their explicitness, but because of their intimacy. Touch, restraint, and observation become charged acts, reframing care as something that can violate as easily as it can heal.

Visually, Adam Crosby’s cinematography reinforces the film’s emotional claustrophobia without resorting to excess. The compositions emphasize enclosure and observation, often framing characters within rigid architectural lines or through layers of glass and fabric. The palette and lighting choices evoke an earlier era without feeling mannered, supporting the story’s themes of entrapment and curated reality.

If HONEY BUNCH stumbles at all, it’s in its final arc, where certain revelations arrive with slightly less force than the buildup promises. The film doesn’t fracture or betray its ideas, but it does pull its punches just enough to leave a sense of unresolved tension. Whether that restraint feels honest or frustrating will depend on the viewer’s tolerance for ambiguity. For some, the refusal to offer closure will feel earned. For others, it may register as a missed opportunity to push its emotional conclusions further.

Ultimately, these are measured criticisms rather than fundamental flaws. HONEY BUNCH is a confident, emotionally intelligent work that understands exactly what kind of discomfort it wants to create. It trusts its audience to sit with that unease rather than escape it, and it refuses the safety of clear answers. In a genre landscape crowded with metaphor-heavy provocation and ironic detachment, that sincerity feels radical.

As a piece of genre cinema, the film stands out not because it reshapes horror, but because it remembers what horror can do when it stays close to human behavior. It recognizes that the most frightening transformations are not monstrous, but intimate, the moment when care becomes possession and devotion loses its ethical grounding. HONEY BUNCH doesn’t ask whether love can save us. It asks what happens when love decides it knows better than we do.

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[photo courtesy of SHUDDER]

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