Honeymoon

In reading about this movie, director/writer Leigh Janiak said it was about taking one small moment and using it as a wedge to see how far apart characters could be split apart until they break. It’s a great metaphor for her movie, because one small element breaks this otherwise decent thriller. I gotta give props to the actors (even if Rose Leslie’s Scottish accent isn’t always hidden the best). They do their parts to portray this loving couple on their honeymoon. When they’re cute and adoring each other and just wanted to sex each other into a coma, you can feel the chemistry. They’re sweet and they feel like a honeymooning couple. And a lot of the direction, from a visual standpoint, is lovely. The use of the surroundings, the camera movements and how scenes are blocked, are all done far better than you’d expect from a rookie (even if the soundtrack, on several occasions, interferes or runs counter to the scene). But that one element that ruins the movie is the entire purpose of the movie. As soon as the plot kicks in, the movie loses what made it so enjoyable to start. Once the plot kicks in, nothing about the couple is believable. The husband’s reactions to the weird things that keep piling up about his wife and what’s going on are fine in and of themselves, but when he goes from disproportionately upset about wounds on her leg that she swears are mosquito bites but aren’t, or her sleepwalking naked in the forest, and then goes back to making breakfast or going on a riverboat ride with her … yeah, what the hell? All her odd behavior piles up very quickly, and he’s upset in the moment, but then then go back to doing honeymoon things, and it doesn’t gel. It feels like two storylines with two characters running at odds with each other, and it ruins the mood of the movie. And that’s a shame, because the slow drip feed of tension is well done, and the horror elements are executed nicely without the need for jump scares or being too ridiculous. And the final reveal is handled expertly, giving you just enough to be terrifying without filling in so many blanks that it loses all of the horror or comes off as silly. But that lack of natural human behavior just … it just eats away at the cohesion of this movie. You'll spend so much time of this movie going “THIS IS NOT HOW PEOPLE BEHAVE”. And while unnatural human behavior is normal in horror movies, when you have a movie built on two people, it can’t be glossed over. It becomes the fundamental core of 75% of the movie, and that’s not a solid core to build around. Some may be able to look past it and enjoy the slow burn. For me, it’s fine and watchable, but it collapses under its own weight. You can only see the “weird thing happens—>awkward reaction—>tense conversation—>back to normal” cycle happen so many times before it becomes tedious.