A love story refracted through broken memory and clinical obsession, Honey Bunch is a coolly unsettling chamber piece that folds romance into speculative body horror. Directed by Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer, the film explores the fragile architecture of intimacy with a precision that feels both surgical and deeply human.

Diana awakens in transit, ferried by her husband toward a remote experimental trauma facility buried in the wilderness. The reason for the journey has slipped from her grasp, and that absence becomes the film’s central engine. Memory in Honey Bunch is treated not as a passive repository but as contested territory — something that can be edited, erased, and repurposed in the pursuit of an idealised union. As fragments return, so too do the sinister implications of her marriage, and the film gradually reveals a macabre scientific underworld obsessed with engineering perfect compatibility.

The performances anchor the film’s speculative conceits in bruising emotional reality. Grace Glowicki gives a finely calibrated turn as Diana, charting her character’s oscillation between vulnerability and dawning suspicion with minute physical detail. Opposite her, Ben Petrie plays the husband with a carefully modulated ambiguity, his tenderness always shadowed by something clinical and withholding. The supporting presence of Jason Isaacs and Kate Dickie deepens the film’s atmosphere of institutional unease; both lend gravitas to a world where love has been subjected to experimental scrutiny.

Visually, the film is austere and tactile. The wilderness setting feels less like an escape than a sealed laboratory, its natural beauty contrasting sharply with the antiseptic interiors of the facility. Mancinelli and Sims-Fewer construct a series of twists that spiral into a macabre meditation on the pursuit of soulmates — a quest that tests the ethical boundaries of devotion. Their direction favours mood over spectacle, allowing dread to accumulate in quiet spaces and loaded silences.

What elevates Honey Bunch is its insistence on imperfection. Beneath its science-fiction trappings lies a probing question: if love is predicated on accepting another’s flaws, what happens when technology promises to sand those flaws away? The film’s answer is neither simple nor comforting. Instead, it presents a haunting vision of romance strained through the machinery of control, where the desire for unity risks erasing the very qualities that make connection meaningful.

The Prognosis:

Honey Bunch stands as a striking synthesis of performance and idea — a cerebral, emotionally resonant work that twists the language of genre into a meditation on memory, identity, and the dangerous allure of engineered love.

• Saul Muerte

Honey Bunch streams on Shudder from Jan 13.