Honeymoon, the debut horror film from director Leigh Janiak, takes us to a cabin the woods – a locale so immediately familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the genre that it was even used as the title of a recent deconstruction of the genre. But Janiak’s film takes the audience to a much richer emotional place; instead of focusing on shallow teen stereotypes, she fixes her camera unstintingly on a newlywed couple, drilling into the anxieties of pledging themselves to someone for the rest of their lives. Even after hearing the vows, can you ever completely know your spouse? What secrets can hide beneath the surface?
At the onset, Bea (Rose Leslie) and Paul (Harry Treadaway) are the picture of marital bliss. Young and broke, but totally in love, they forsake a more exotic honeymoon for a trip into Bea’s past, traveling to a remote lake to visit a family cabin Bea spent time in as a child. The first twenty minutes contain barely a hint of horror; instead they’re spent setting the tone of Bea and Paul’s relationship – a marriage between friends, where everything is shared, from goofy jokes to household duties. It’s not until they meet another character that the first fissures in their happiness appear. Bea and Paul walk into a restaurant to find a childhood friend of Bea’s acting violently strange. While he tries to deflect attention from his behavior, the encounter only becomes more unsettling when his wife shows up – acting, as Bea notes later, like she’s “not all there.”
But Bea and Paul are able to laugh this off and the real trouble doesn’t start until later that night, when Paul is awoken by strange lights and noises and leaves their bed to investigate, only to return to an empty bed. Trying to convince himself that Bea is only playing a game, Paul searches for her, growing more and more scared until he finds her in the middle of the woods.
Something very strange has clearly just happened, yet Bea denies that anything is out of the ordinary. Paul tries to shut it out of his mind, but the next morning, more oddities compound his growing unease. There are strange marks on Bea’s legs. She wants to do things she explicitly swore off the day before. She’s evasive and lies about strange things. But most of all, her personality seems…different. She doesn’t remember jokes and memories that the two share. Paul, on his honeymoon with the woman he thought he knew better than anyone alive, grows unsure that the person he’s spending every moment with is someone he knows at all, and the intimacy he’s opened himself up to becomes a terrifying proposition.
Honeymoon is a film that puts its ingredients to their best possible uses. It uses the genre conventions of horror in a manner that will satisfy horror fans, including relentless suspense and some gross-out body horror, but in an emotionally real storyline, grounded in uncertainties recognizable to any member of a couple. It wrings a full-fledged story out of a tiny cast and essentially one location in manner that feels both authentic and necessary. Honeymoon is that rare beast, an intellectually satisfying horror movie, which establishes Janiak as a talent to watch. Just don’t see it on a date.
