Modern horror filmmakers are gaga over artists like John Carpenter and Stanley Kubrick, but few are striving for the insinuating creepiness of movies like Jack Clayton’s “The Innocents” or Nicolas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now.” That’s the tradition to which “Honey Bunch” belongs, and its ambition is to be applauded.
I’m talking about horror that roosts in the psyche of its characters, blurring the line of reality between fragile minds besieged by tragedy and evil conspiracies — the kind of movies where every detail is a potential bellwether of insanity, conspiracy or both. You know, the kind of movie that revels in fleeting eerie touches that tickle the back of your mind, hinting at a vast ineffable awfulness that connects with our worst fears of loss.
It’s not hard to see why modern filmmakers aren’t pursuing this kind of movie more often: they are difficult to bring off and not especially fun, if brought off well. “Don’t Look Now” is among the most disturbing films that I’ve seen, and one of the most perceptive about the unmooring qualities of grief. It’s not the kind of horror movie that one invites buddies over to watch it with snacks. It’s too intimate and rich and painful.
The writing-directing duo, Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer, do not conjure that sort of intensity, but their work here is promising and satisfying. Theirs is a film that you could invite your buddies over to see without fear of things getting too real, but there are hints here of more personal, which to say dangerous, horror.
Uncanny things abound. A woman runs into the woods. Why? There are quick cuts of potentially imaginary people coughing, gasping, or bent over with grief and sickness. Men have secret conversations despite just meeting. The cinematography abounds in prismatic autumnal lighting that suggests the aura of sunlight coming through an old window in an attic—the kind of light that’s nostalgic and creepy in equal parts.
The movie is told from the point of view of Diana (Grace Glowicki). After an accident, her memory is so shaky that she doesn’t even remember why her husband, Homer (Ben Petrie), is driving her to a remote facility in the countryside. They arrive and the interior of the place suggests a cluttered bed and breakfast — the studied friendliness of this refutation of institutional sterility is creepier than said sterility. Farah (Kate Dickie) is their point of contact, and she has an elaborate backstory with a woman whose portraits hang on every wall. If you’re a veteran of mind-screw movies, you wonder if Diana and the woman in the portrait are one and the same. Discordant notes abound.
We seem to be in the 1970s, which Mancinelli and Sims-Fewer establish more persuasively than most modern filmmakers do, but maybe these characters are unmoored from time. A horror film from last year, “Cuckoo,” had some of these diaphanous qualities as well. You’re suspicious of Homer, and of Farah, whom Homer and Diana deem “Mrs. Danvers.” Maybe it is the ‘70s. How many modern, thirty-ish social media-fried couples would have a “Rebecca” reference at their fingertips?
The accomplished gothic atmosphere establishes a rapport between the movie and the audience. You lean back and enjoy the mystery, assuming you’re in good hands. Diana wants to know what this institution intends to do with her, and we share her paranoia. Homer is not a traditional alpha monster, but an amusing dweeb who lives in his own mind— a male type that is hardly more reassuring in horror movies. They speak to one another with a familiarity that suggests the conversations of people in actual relationships, with in-jokes and a sense of a shared history. The script does not strand the actors with the expository blather that is the bane of modern horror fantasy.
The big reveal is refreshingly messy and divisive. My partner thought it was weird and unsatisfying, while I wanted it weirder — a familiar distinction in our responses to movies. “Honey Bunch” isn’t an easy reminder of the piggishness of men, but a thornier journey along the porous boundaries between love and codependency and selfishness and selflessness and obsession that govern relationships. There are monsters that have their (terrifyingly relatable) reasons. The climax is one part that doesn’t benefit from the filmmakers’ light and ironic touch, however. Given the implications of the premise, the tone of the ending is disappointingly flippant.
Another movie that “Honey Bunch” brought to mind is Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island,” a journey into grief and crumbling realities that is anything but diaphanous and subtle. Or is it? Scorsese’s haunted insane asylum is laid out in thunderous all caps, but there are piercing scares that hint at fissures in existence.
“Shutter Island” has a singularly creepy bit that is easy to miss: when a patient is interviewed by Leonardo DiCaprio’s detective, she picks up a glass of water and takes a drink (and so what) and then her hand is empty and was there ever a glass of water? A second’s worth of film that I’ve never forgotten, which points towards the challenge for filmmakers in mounting this sort of movie: They must trust the audience enough to hide their darlings. Mancinelli and Sims-Fewer spring similar effects, though they soft-sell the tragedy and perversity that threaten to steer their movie into classic mind-screw terrain. Scorsese, a maximalist, ensures that you feel it.
This week’s second offering, “Bunny,” also boasts vivid atmosphere and confident performances and direction as well as a final third that doesn’t quite live up to the promise surrounding it. This film fritters itself away, but it’s a good time.
It opens in media res, with Bunny (Mo Stark), running battered into an East Village tenement, where he switches clothes and tries to clean himself up only to run into his wife, Bobbie (Liza Colby), who has brought another woman into their apartment for a three-way for Bunny’s birthday. Bunny casually shrugs off the dreams of many straight men, saying that he would rather spend a night in. The movie is about the many ways in which that simple desire is denied him.
“Bunny” is a farce outfitted with a modern empathetic attitude about sex and race and class. We learn that Bunny is a sex worker, which the movie accepts with a casualness that is reminiscent of movies of the 1970s. People of varying races and ages and faiths keep entering and exiting Bunny’s apartment building, and the movie is so tolerant that not even the dorky middle-aged white guy is ridiculed. “Bunny” has a lovely and matter-of-fact willingness to meet everyone on their own terms, and that empathy is the film’s attitude and its subject. In this gritty, stinking tenement that many people would walk right past is an ideal America that exists in spite and perhaps because of its marginalization.
The movie is tolerant but not naïve. It understands that people’s differences are exhilarating but also a pain in the ass. Bunny arises as the nucleus of this teeming society, a nice guy who has problems that must be resolved all while tending to the ecstatic weirdness of people. Director Ben Jacobson, who wrote “Bunny” with Stark and Stefan Marolachakis, has a marvelous sense of timing and pacing. This is a fluid movie, with a cast of a dozen or so exiting and entering the various cramped rooms with a rhythm that’s convincing as well as musical in its precision.
I’m talking around the plot because it’s an “and then this happened” joint, structured as a series of shaggy dog jokes that you might hear at a bar. For a pleasant and humanistic hang-out movie, some of the jokes and plot turns are strikingly dark — Jacobsen and his huge and exceptional cast are not afraid to push things. Picture “Anora” if it was funnier and surprising and nearly an hour shorter and you’re in the neighborhood. “Bunny” gains ground upon retrospection, its slightness growing into grace.
“Honey Bunch” is streaming on AMC + and “Bunny” can be found on Netflix. Both are also rentable on demand.
