Shudder dropped Honey Bunch on February 13th, the day before Valentine’s Day, and that was not an accident. This is a love story. A genuinely, deeply felt, completely unhinged love story dressed in the clothes of a gothic thriller, and it is one of the best things currently sitting in your streaming queue whether you know it yet or not.
The Setup
Diana wakes from a coma with her memories scrambled and her grip on reality loosened considerably. Her husband Homer, devoted and slightly too calm about the whole situation, takes her to a remote experimental facility in the wilderness where specialists promise to help piece her back together. The facility is quiet. The staff are peculiar. The treatments are not entirely explained. And the more Diana’s memories return, the more the shape of her marriage starts to look like something she isn’t sure she recognizes.
It’s Vertigo by way of Phantom Thread with a Canadian indie budget and absolutely zero intention of playing it safe. Which is to say, it’s exactly our kind of film.
That Cinematography
Here’s where Honey Bunch earns its keep entirely on its own terms. Directors Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli, a real-life married couple, which explains a great deal about how much genuine feeling bleeds through the screen, shot this thing like a fever dream pulled from a deteriorating 1970s print.
The grain is deliberate and it is glorious. The palette leans into muted golds, institutional greens, and the specific kind of amber light that makes everything look simultaneously warm and deeply wrong. Wardrobe, set design, and score all commit to the same decade without tipping into costume party pastiche. This isn’t nostalgia for its own sake. The visual language is doing real work, wrapping the story in a texture that feels like a memory that isn’t quite yours. Like finding a photograph of a place you’ve never been and somehow recognizing it anyway.
The effect is quietly hallucinatory in the best way. You feel slightly off-balance for the entire runtime and the film is absolutely counting on that.
The Love Story at the Center of It All
What separates Honey Bunch from the crowded field of psychological horror on streaming right now is what it actually cares about underneath all the atmosphere and dread. This is a film asking genuinely thorny questions about love. How far is too far, what does devotion cost, and at what point does holding onto someone stop being love and start being something else entirely.
Grace Glowicki as Diana is extraordinary, carrying the whole weight of the film’s mystery in a performance that walks the line between fragility and quiet ferocity without ever fully landing on either side. Ben Petrie as Homer is doing something equally subtle. You spend the entire film trying to decide whether he’s the safest person Diana has or the most dangerous one, and Petrie never tips his hand.
Honey Bunch is currently streaming on Shudder.