SXSW 2014: Rose Leslie's HONEYMOON Review

“HONEYMOON” (SXSW Movie Review)

“Have you ever killed something?” Bea asks. It’s less an ominous foreshadow—although, there’s plenty of that—and more simply a new wife helping her new husband understand her outdoors-heavy past. When Paul (Harry Treadaway) first arrives at Bea’s (Rose Leslie) family cabin, he’s confronted with the “Bear Room,” that which houses the skin of an enormous black bear, as well as continuous evidence of Bea’s truly handy skills. For the bridegroom, it’s frankly intimidating. When Paul is additionally face-to-face with a summer fling from Bea’s adolescence, a chilling layer of real, very human anxiety forms in Leigh Janiak’s feature debut. Bubbling just underneath the distressing question of, “How well do I know who I married?” is another dreadful prospect: “Am I enough for this stranger?”

Like many of its forebearers, HONEYMOON is a cabin-set scary story. Refreshingly however, director Janiak avoids much in the way of traditional jolts, instead choosing to unsettle with a scenario of new domestic bliss lost to mistrust and helpless concern. On their second night of a secluded getaway, Paul resolves to get up intensely early to prove his own real-world skills and catch some lake-dwelling dinner. Failing to even get out of the house competently with all the fishing gear, he discovers Bea out of bed and possibly missing out in the pitch-black woods. Bea is eventually found standing nude in some state of shock. What follows is a few frightening days in which she’s poor at recalling many things soundly, while clearly concealing a terrible fate.

Adorned with a fuzzy, idyllic aesthetic of the great outdoors, Janiak is very clearly working in contrast. The peace of nature surrounds the unnatural, and tight, often admirable long takes constrict and convey the frenzy that’s not supposed to descend after the happiest day of your life. In fact, it seems the heaviest, scariest moment in HONEYMOON sees Paul already taking to spying in his new union, uncovering Bea in the bathroom mirror rehearsing excuses to refrain from intimacy. There are few things worse than being lied to. One is to know you’re being lied to.

And like so, HONEYMOON creeps up its viewer as Paul attempts to genuinely care for a person he didn’t marry. Being an intimate piece—actors Leslie and Treadaway largely carry HONEYMOON, oddly both concealing their UK accents—the film waits to reveal all that’s wild and gross.

Unfortunately such threatens to undercut the director’s otherwise assured hand, as Paul’s admirable empathetic approach to helping Bea is saddled with far too many utterances and variations of, “Just tell me what’s going on.” Still, Leslie’s stirring performance and Bea’s ultimate situation is far too powerful, far too memorable (and pretty gnarly) to deflate a lasting chill.

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One night after their encounter, Paul wakes up to an empty bed, unable to find Bea anywhere in the house. He wanders outside and finds her naked, freezing cold and covered in mud. After he brings her back to the house, he notices some odd marks on her inner thigh. And things keep getting weirder from there.

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After his wife Bea (Rose Leslie) goes missing for a few hours during their up-to-that-point idyllic honeymoon, it becomes increasingly clear that she’s not well. She’s not necessarily being unkind towards him, but there’s a wounded sensitivity there that causes her to pull away from Paul. His response to her withdrawing a bit? To whine and needle and attempt to guilt her into sex at every turn. “I’m your husband,” he proclaims after being spurned (to be clear, they have had plenty of sex up until this point – maybe the lady just wants a day off). He equates physical validation with love at every turn and certainly puts a higher premium on it than trying to help her through whatever she’s going through.

Of course, the reason Bea is behaving differently is that she is different. Some kind of Alien presence is inhabiting her body Almost Human style and is trying to ape her behavior (to what purpose, I’m not sure – though there is some admittedly gooey practical body horror that goes along with this that I quite enjoyed). We should be feeling bad for Paul. This is some tragic sh*t, after all. But when he gets angry that she doesn’t enjoy a lame pantomime involving a frog he’s planning on cooking for dinner – it’s hard not to want to punch him.