Honey Bunch

Directed by Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer, Honey Bunch follows a couple (Grace Glowicki’s Diana and Ben Petrie’s Homer) as they arrive at a remote facility in the hopes of curing Diana’s accident-related injuries. Filmmakers Mancinelli and Sims-Fewer deliver a progressively intolerable endeavor that strikes all the wrong notes right from the get-go, as the movie, which runs a virtually endless 113 minutes, has been suffused with a pervasively (and frustratingly) off-kilter feel that’s reflected in its myriad of disagreeable attributes – including Adam Crosby’s gauzy, ugly visuals and a raft of gratingly larger-than-life performances. (Glowicki and Petrie are both so aggressively quirky here that it remains impossible to sympathize with or connect to their characters for even a second.) And while the picture admittedly does take some admirably unexpected twists in its second half, Honey Bunch has long-since alienated the viewer to such an extent that it’s impossible to work up the slightest bit of interest in any of this – with the end result an absolutely interminable trainwreck that squanders the good will afforded by Mancinelli and Sims-Fewer’s comparably flawless debut, 2020’s Violation.

no stars out of ****