“When you’ve seen every version of someone and keep coming back, that’s romance,” Homer (Ben Petrie) says to Diana (Grace Glowicki) in “Honey Bunch,” as she fears she’s shown her worst side of late. The two were in a car accident that left her with a shattered hip and sporadic memory loss and she has felt like “a little old lady” ever since, especially when she’s admitted into a clinic far removed from society where the tranquil forest setting is hardly giving her peace of mind. Homer appears steadfast in his love for her, dropping everything to spend four days with her at the retreat suggested by her physician that specializes in an innovative “sensory stimulation therapy” to jog her memory, but Diana can’t help but wonder where she is and who’s she’s with when she doesn’t seem to be herself.
Those questions only intensify as “Honey Bunch” wears on, which like Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer’s brilliant debut feature of a few years ago “Violation” exhilaratingly evolves into something else entirely from where it starts out. No less impressive and even a tad more ambitious than their look at the fallout from a sexual assault, the directing duo once again train their lens on a young woman looking for a way out of the woods both literally and figuratively as Diana submits to treatment at a wellness center run by the mysterious Dr. Trephine, any concern about whether she’ll ever walk again without a cane is supplanted by what support she has in other corners. When she remembers little before the accident, she’s come to rely on Homer, with whom she was having an argument — about growing old together, of all things — when their car was hit, and she finds it hard to entirely trust the main caretaker at the facility (Kate Dickie), who manages to share plenty of history of Dr. Trephine’s practice without ever seeming to say much.
There’s no doubt that what’s happening to Diana is horrific, but Mancinelli and Sims-Fewer take an exciting turn towards sci-fi here after the bloodshed in their debut as the therapy actually starts to work on Diana. But with the return of memories, she starts to see a relationship with Homer that may not have been all that healthy and now seeing him look a little too comfortable talking to staff and others at the facility, namely Joseph (Jason Isaacs) who’s brought in his own daughter (India Brown) to recover a sense of who she is, she is pained by the thought that she’s somehow being gaslit. Just as he’s gotten to see her at her lowest moment, she starts to see another side of him as well, with Mancinelli and Sims-Fewer cannily confusing the issue visually with hallucinations and other potential misperceptions to come from the treatment when Diana is receiving, mimicking the self-doubt anyone would experience when starting to question someone they loved dearly.
There’s a bone-deep level of attraction between the two, surely burnished by the fact that “Honey Bunch” was penned by one real-life couple and ultimately acted out by another, and beyond contributing to the clear comfort Homer and Diana have around one another, evident in their physicality and their teasing repartee, the trust behind the scenes probably pushes the relationship drama into territory few others would dare to tread. There’s the explicitly surreal as Diana starts to learn the truth about her surroundings during her walks around the premises, but equally harrowing is the disillusionment you can simply see in the performances as the couple struggle to recognize one another after a shattering traumatic event brings into focus much smaller preexisting fissures between them and what can look like compassion can be later seen as self-interest or vice versa.
As these thoughts turn over in the heads of the characters, the shape-shifting narrative is greatly accentuated by a truly marvelous score from Andrea Boccadoro with sumptuous orchestral swoons of gothic romances past (Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” is nodded to in both the script and the score) and a human chorale that can set the heart racing in a more modern key with echoes of folk horror. Just when you think you’ve seen every version of a love story there is, “Honey Bunch” comes along to say something new.
“Honey Bunch” does not yet have U.S. distribution.