Review of Honeymoon (2014) by Darren B — 16 Jun 2015

I'm really not sure how to rate this. There was enough skill in it that I feel like it kind of warrants three stars, but I really, really didn't like the last third, and I generally disliked the last half. I haven't felt this way about many movies before; usually if I'm fully onboard throughout the first half hour, I'm not going to hate what comes after it.

The best thing about this film is the characterization. At the beginning, there's a good half hour or so of Paul and Bea just being cute together. You get a really distinct impression of their dynamic, with lots of funny goofing around. The credit goes to Harry Treadaway and Rose Leslie, who make their characters extremely likable together. They feel like real people, and that means that once the horror does actually begin, you're pretty invested in it. More horror movies should take cues from this movie; the thing I often dislike about horror movies is that the characters are almost never likable. That makes for fun viewing as you can kind of take a perverse joy in their deaths, but it'd still be nice to have some horror movies where you actually want the main characters to survive, you know? Honeymoon definitely succeeds at that. When the horror first began, I did genuinely feel really worried. I liked Paul a lot, and it hurt to see the way Bea was treating him. I just wanted them to have their happy ending, to get back to where they were in the first 20 minutes. So that was a success.

One problem is that at the movie goes on, their personalities go away. I mean, Paul's goal the whole time is to help Bea, so his love for her is always apparent, but neither of them really gets to be likable or unique in any way anymore. In part that's just a hard thing to accomplish when there's important plot to get through, and I'm not necessarily saying Paul should just be cracking his silly jokes while his wife is bleeding copiously out of her vagina. But after a while, you kind of forget about the solid work the movie did in building up their characters because they start to resemble typical horror movie characters. That said, the acting remains great throughout, and Treadaway gets Paul's increasing horror just right. There's one scene that I hated, which I'll get to in a moment, but as it's happening, the look on Treadaway's face shows that he's almost in shock at how horrifying this is, and it works well.

Probably my least favorite thing is just how Honeymoon begins to resemble a typical horror movie. The first half was scary because of the slight changes to Bea's personality, the slip-ups she was beginning to make. The slow build-up to her complete insanity is pretty good and well-paced. But then, Paul pulls a giant worm out of Bea's vagina, and the movie becomes some sort of...alien movie? Bug movie? Regardless, it's just such a standard horror movie plot, and I thought this movie was better than that. The problem isn't necessarily that it's a common plot; movies like The Conjuring make good use out of preexisting plots. It's disappointing because the middle third or so is so scary and enthralling because of the subtlety, the slowly shifting dynamics in Paul and Bea's relationship. When Paul pulls an alien-bug-thing out of Bea's twat, it quickly descends to gross-out horror. True, it is really disgusting, and you should've seen my face as I was watching that scene. But it was also the scene that made me immediately disengage from the movie. I stayed in this unimpressed state as Bea drowned Paul, then when she and Annie, fully turned into this humanoid bug-alien things, step into the light at the end.

The thing is, Leigh Janiak's direction is really great. All the cute scenes at the beginning are shot excellently, from the wedding video as they face the camera to the long take of them touring the cabin as Paul's trying to have sex with Bea. These actors are great, the direction is great, and the sound design is great, and all of those remain constant even when the script descends into madness at the end. After Paul dies, the camera shows static shots of different parts of the house where this horrific story has taken place, and when Bea, newly alien-turned, gazes silently at the mirror, the sound goes quiet. You forget momentarily about how dumb this is and you do feel a little bit of fear. The technical elements do make the movie disturbing. There's a lot of talent here. It's just a shame the movie got away from psychological horror and started following the typical gross-out alien-type horror beats.