'Honeymoon' - Review

Bea and Paul (Rose Leslie and Harry Treadaway) are a newly-wed couple who retreat to a small family cabin in the woods to spend a few precious days alone together. On the second night, Bea appears to sleepwalk into the forest where Paul finds her naked and petrified. Despite attempting to convince her husband that she’s perfectly okay, Bea soon begins to exhibit strange mannerisms and forgets everyday facts, further fuelling Paul’s suspicions that there is something darker at work.

This is the basic setup of Leigh Janiak’s Honeymoon, a small B-movie chiller seemingly made by someone who actually understands that horror is more about poking the audience with a cattle-prod to create a jump response. Everything scary or horrifying here is drawn out slowly from an emerging sense of unease, uncertainty, to full-blown paranoia, with not a single jump-scare to blemish its surface. Whilst this has the down-side of taking just a little too long to get going given it’s already tight run-time, it’s quite encouraging to see a mainstream chiller that asks the audience to engage with it rather than turn their brains off for cheap thrills.

The two leads at the heart of the story deliver near-perfect performances, particularly Leslie as Bea’s persona begins to waver and deform. You absolutely believe that they are two fresh-faced young people who are totally besotted with each other, which makes it all the more heart-breaking when everything starts to fall apart and the awfulness of it all becomes an overbearing, inescapable presence. For the first time in living memory, I forgave a central character in a horror film from wandering about in dark, clearly dangerous places purely because I knew that said character had no other choice.

The intimate camerawork that presided over the greater half of the film is essential in the early scenes of the two lovers, establishing their utter devotion to each other (partially by means of wedding video footage), but is also used to great effect when things begin to go wrong. The closeness of the camera means the frame is almost completely filled and prevents a trope that hangs over most contemporary horror films like a curse: you spend half the film fixated on the empty parts of the frame waiting for something to pop-up.

A carefully places soundtrack does nothing to ease the suspense, appearing as a slow drip-feed of haunting chimes like the final notes of an unwound musical box. It never threatens to drown out the sound design but merely lies just under the surface, waiting for the right moment to explode. The creepy atmosphere is topped-off nicely with tiny references to the original The Evil Dead (the swinging wooden chair beside the door, the desolate cabin in the woods) and even Straw Dogs, when a former friend – or possibly lover – of Bea becomes entangled in the proceedings.

Exceeding its humble B-movie origins thanks to stellar performances and a reliance on paranoia and discomfort over screaming and banging, Honeymoon is a proper chiller that deserves more than it’s very limited release. Yes it may be a slow burn, yes one or two of the plot developments are spelled out in foot high letters but if you’re willing to forgive it, you’re in for a rare treat.  

4 stars