Honeymoon 2014

[6.0/10] There’s few things that frustrate me like a good idea and a great performance wasted on a mediocre movie. Honeymoon features Rose Leslie at her best, taking the layered, disturbed personality that motivates the film and honoring the different shades of her. It also pursues some interesting thematic material, within a solid thought experiment, about hanging onto something you know is doomed to suck the last bit of marrow from the bones before letting go.

And yet, it’s also a movie that doesn't really work until the third act, and even then, requires some sizable leaps in logic to make everything add up. It’s a film whose symbolism and setups feel obvious, and which struggles to make its characters seem like human beings, something that’s a hindrance up until the point that Bea (Leslie’s character) isn’t really a human being anymore.

The film tells the story of a couple who celebrate their honeymoon by retreating to the bride’s old family home in the middle of nowhere in Canada. It’s a pretty standard “cabin in the woods” type setup, where cell towers and internet access and other modern conveniences (and defenses) are conspicuously absent, and where creepy encounters with relevant strangers are the order of the day. After Bea mysteriously walks out into the woods in the middle of the night one evening, things start to take a turn for the strange and Paul, her husband, tries to suss out exactly what happened.

There’s a few major problems with this premise. The first is that the first act of the movie tries to spend a lot of time with Bea and Paul as a lovey-dovey pair of newlyweds, both so that it can set a contrast for later in the film when something is decidedly off in their relationship, and so that it can try to endear the characters to us before the horror story kicks into gear. The catch is that Rose Leslie and Harry Treadaway’s romantic chemistry never rises above fine, and the dialogue never surpasses the sense that it’s a weird impression of cute and playful couple conversations rather than the genuine article.

The result is that the first part of the movie, where they’re just establishing the rules of the story and trying to let us get to know these people so that we can contrast their later behavior, is at best, unconvincing, and at worst, boring. The horror events don’t matter if you’re not invested in the protagonists, and it’s tough to invest when the dialogue and interactions ring thoroughly false, fingers crossed, and facepalm-worthy.

That could be forgivable (pulling off legitimate romantic chemistry is hard!) if Paul didn’t act like an idiot or, ironically, like an alien, when all the weird stuff starts going down. Part of that is on the movie’s overall narrative, because it wants to try to cloud the supernatural material with the obvious red herring that Bea might be cheating on her new husband with her old friend from town. The film tries to keep Paul blinkered on that possibility, but it doesn't explain her clear memory loss or other strange behaviors that go far beyond an “I did a bad thing and am trying to deflect” feint that Honeymoon half-heartedly tries to sell.

Even if that were the case, there’s tons of moments where Paul should call 911, or take Bea to the nearest hospital, or do just about anything than sit around and wait for things to get worse. I try to be sympathetic to characters not acting with perfect tactics in films. Real life situations can be stressful, and we don't always make the right choices. But Paul (who’s kind of a drip to begin with) consistently reacts to disturbing, alarming things with little more than an extended moping stint and a head-scratch-worthy lack of any effort to actually get his new wife help at any point. When your film requires its characters to be consistently, inexplicably inert for the horror to work, it takes all of the air out of the film.

The two things that rescue Honeymoon from the scrap heap are a stellar outing from Leslie and a dose of compelling psychological/thematic material. While Leslie’s efforts to sync with Treadaway as an adoring, teasing couple are unavailing, once she transitions to playing the victim of a trauma, one trying to hold onto her identity and a slippery bit of normalcy before a foreign force overtakes her, she really shines. Leslie does an incredible job at selling the tricky idea of a person whose true self is bubbling under the surface, but awash in struggles to bury the terrible inevitability lurking in the background and tame the overwhelming forces that are beyond her control. She also delivers a superb physical performance, with her body language with Paul, and even her tied-up flails communicating all kinds of character.

At the same time, the psychological trauma of someone who knows that something terrible has happened and will have to be confronted, whose holding onto their last bits of sanity and self, wanting to cherish and savor the last moments of bliss before a loved one is forced to confront those things too is a compelling tack within Honeymoon. Despite the film’s implied supernatural explanation, there’s a rape trauma metaphor at play, one of changed behaviors and deflections because something is impossibly difficult to discuss and share with the person you love.

The rub is that all of this is more interesting in concept than in execution. Much of the film’s first act consists of the aforementioned unconvincing romantic interludes. And its long second act consists mainly of Paul looking around blankly like the dope that he is, while the movie stacks implausibility on top of implausibility as it teases its mystery box. It’s not until the third act, where the film fully pulls the trigger on both its horror and the payoff to all that throat-clearing, that things really kick into gear and those pieces of thematic heft and Leslie’s performance are allowed to take the spotlight.

Unfortunately, it’s just too little, too late, with too few worthwhile pieces put in place to build to the film’s admittedly unnerving and poignant ending. When Honeymoon actually dives into the answers and rationales it’s been circling around for the prior hour, it clicks into place. But up until that point, it’s an elongated slog, one that smothers Leslie’s great turn and the quality ideas under the hood in protagonist idiocy and a stock relationship that doesn't get compelling or remotely unbelievable until long after things have gone terribly wrong.

With that, Honeymoon proves itself a film with some considerable assets, but one that can’t fully elevate the stock, unbelievable horror story nonsense the show tries to build around them.