A Deeply Odd Descent into Love, Memory, and Control: Honey Bunch Film Review

Still from Honey Bunch. © 2025 Cat People.

Honey Bunch immediately sets viewers on edge. While the film announces itself as a psychological horror, the natural charm oozing from the leads Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie quickly pushes the film into a more comedic and absurd realm. Directed by Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli (the duo behind Violation), Honey Bunch is a fascinating indie horror that delves deep into ideas surrounding power, memory and care in intimate relationships, while managing to not take itself too seriously.

Honey Bunch film poster.

The film’s premise feels like well-trodden territory. Diana (Grace Glowicki) awakens from a coma with her memory fractured and unreliable. Her husband (Ben Petrie) escorts her to a remote, experimental facility deep in the wilderness, hoping to restore what has been lost. As treatments intensify, so do Diana’s doubts. Can she trust the process? The facility itself? Or the man who claims to love her?

Rather than leaning into prestige-horror pretension, Honey Bunch does something more difficult and more interesting. It takes the central question: What happened to Diana, and can she trust her husband? And puts two actors typically known for their comedic work, Glowicki and Petrie, into the lead roles, allowing the audience to have more fun with the premise.

One of the film’s greatest strengths is its tone. This is a deeply odd movie. Unsettling, yes, but also frequently very funny. Instead of presenting Diana as a passive housewife in this 1970s landscape, the film allows her confusion, curiosity, and resistance to drive the narrative. Glowicki is allowed to gaze wide-eyed at the camera and make you laugh, as well as be the heroine you root for as she attempts to uncover the central mystery.

Fellow fans of her collaborations with Petrie will recognize how their established comedic personas are cleverly re-contextualized here. Their real-life partnership gives the marital dynamics an unsettling authenticity: tender one moment, and claustrophobic the next.

Visually and atmospherically, Honey Bunch invites comparison to Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster, but it feels less self-serious and more emotionally generous. Filmed in Owen Sound, Ontario, the film also stands as a quietly compelling piece of contemporary Canadian genre cinema.

Honey Bunch will not be for everyone. Its rhythms are unconventional, its tone deliberately off-kilter. But for viewers open to its wavelength, it offers something increasingly rare: a truly original idea in a landscape dominated by remakes and recycled IP. It is funny, unsettling, and thoughtful. I’d watch a thousand Honey Bunch-es before sitting down for the next iteration of the Scream franchise.

Honey Bunch will be in theatres across Canada beginning on January 23, 2026. It is available to stream on Shudder in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand.