Genre newcomer Leigh Janiak shows compelling potential in her subtle, slow-burning debut.
One of the most under-appreciated horror movies of the decade,
Honeymoon seems to play off of some of the concepts developed in the 1978 remake of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but rather than the apocalyptic scenarios of the 1978 film,
Honeymoon pulls it all down to an extremely personal level, which feels just as apocalyptic for our characters. In
Honeymoon, director
Leigh Janiak explores the anxiety of marriage - specifically in newlyweds - and the fear that you may not know the person you just vowed to spend the rest of your life with so well after all.
The paranoid atmosphere and the harrowing ending of
Honeymoon had my stomach in knots the first time I watched it, and Janiak does a terrific job of keeping the audience just outside the know throughout the film. Janiak also intelligently suffuses small quarrels and the types of tensions you’d expect to arise in the conversations of newlyweds (e.g. having children) with an ever-growing feeling that something isn’t right; that the person you thought you knew well enough to predict, from their actions to their words, has without warning become entirely unpredictable, planting seeds of mistrust within the minds of the characters that will bloom into thorny, strangling vines.
This breaking down of the relationship is communicated visually through Janiak and cinematographer
Kyle Klutz’s thoughtful and subtly impressive compositions as well. Framed together and in close proximity for the first part of the film, the two main characters quickly begin to disconnect emotionally, reflected by the increasing solitary shots of them, as the camera moves closer and closer, trapping them in their own separate boxes, imprisoning them with only their own poisoned thoughts.
Even during the times they are framed together later in the film, the distance and detachment between the couple is clear, as one character always has their back to the camera, a stark contrast to the earlier shots of both characters in profile or facing forward. They are no longer on a level playing field, perhaps no longer even on the same playing field at all.
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