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Out in Theaters: HONEYMOON

NOTE: Re-printed from our 2014 SXSW review.

Honeymoon.jpg
In 1954, Colliers Magazine published Jack Finney‘s sci-fi horror serial The Body Snatchers. Since then, this fire starter novella has led to a handful of direct film adaptations (the latest being Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s 2007 The Invasion starring Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman) and dozens of spinoffs (John Carpenter‘s The Thing for instance.) But even more importantly, Finney’s creation all but gave birth to a whole subsection of genre: the infamous body invasion flick. In the years since, many filmmakers have employed this humble little niche market as an elastic stage to claim veritable scares by peddling harrowing practical visual effects and unsettling character shifts (in the best of cases) or CG sight gags and the banal formula of a group’s numbers mysteriously thinning (in the worst of cases). Director and co-writer Leigh Janiak though sees the genre as a chance to explore change on a microscopic scale, to prod just how absolutely horrifying it would be to see the one you love most temporally drained from their own body. Let’s just say, it’s not nice.

With the very talented Rose Leslie (Ygritte from Game of Thrones) and Henry Callaway at her disposal, Janiak prohibits an immense talent for directing her actors into believable territory, even under such inconceivable circumstances. From the opening montage where we meet newlyweds Bea and Paul undergoing matrimonial traditions like cake fighting (even though they forewent a real cake for cinnamon buns) and recounting the events by which they met (bad Indian food, it’s always bad Indian food!) to Rose’s fleeting misguided attempts to protect her husband from her extraterrestrial transformation (“They’ll never find you down here”) and through all the bumping of uglies in between, Leslie and Callaway sell the show as genuine.

Even on the heels of the more outrageous elements, their steadfast performances point to a unshaken understanding of their character’s respective head spaces. For the genre, it’s an uncharacteristically committed pair of performances and with Janiak jamming her cameras right in the midst of their personal space, we feel like we’re right alongside them, an equal victim of some inexplicable emotional violation.  

That is really where the true horror of these kinds of body snatching stories lies. Worse yet than seeing someone shot by a laser beam or abducted by some ethereal blue beam, there’s something infinitely more jarring to standing witness to an individual’s personality being siphoned out of them. Janiak’s film engages this process in stages. After running into what seems like the only other two people living in a ten mile radius, couple Annie and Will (who Bea just so happened to share a summer love with in the way, way back of past childhood flirtations), Janiak presents a first taste of “off-ness”. Annie’s withdrawn, confuzzled and all around off. She’s stage one of a mental virus, the foreshadow of what’s to come.

Shortly after meeting them, Paul wakes in the middle of the night to find the spot in bed next to him abandoned and cold to the touch. With harebrained suspicions of infidelity, he charges from the house only to find Bea naked, disorientated and caked in mud. Upon bringing her inside, a patch of what appears to be bug bites around her crotchal region alarms him. It’s nothing to worry about, she pleads in unconvincing manner. Instead of slamming on the brakes and seeing whatever transformation to come take place overnight, Janiak picks at her plate like a sparrow to birdseed. Like a gas leak from the brainstem, Bea isn’t replaced outright so much as reborn one blink at a time, reinvented with each breathe drawn, re-imagined with every performance of normalcy.

Honeymoon2.jpg
Watching Bea recite milestone events from her own life into the mirror mimics an earlier scene where she practices a speech to get out of engaging in post-marital carnal relations but in the space between, she’s become more drained – more a shell than the filling. She’s lost another chunk of “Bea.” It’s the hollow spaces between the words, the falsity of her gestures, the empty recitation of loving remarks that imbues Honeymoon with such an eerie tautness. Bea being such an unreliable character, we never know what’s coming next and right up to the very last moments, we never really get a grasp on how much “Bea” is left in Bea after all.

And though Honeymoon may take place at a cabin in the woods, the camp has been left at home. Janiak’s take is fatally humorless, devoutly sobering. Instead of harping on frights, she’s left us with a steamy atmosphere so thick you could cut it with a butter knife and serve it at as a wedding cake. Even the hollowed out bride and groom toppers wouldn’t be missing.  

As Bea and Paul’s deserted woodland homestead becomes an unwelcome chrysalis, we’re left with little more than the remains of an evaporating relationship. Like Bea’s special nightgown (though it’s more hoary than whory) that Paul finds in the woods after her disappearance, there’s chunks inexplicably missing, impossible to recover, chalked up to some pieceless puzzle. But even after everything, there’s still some inkling of connection left, some fleeting memory of what it means to care for each other.

Perhaps that’s her intent after all, to show us something beautiful only to take it away, leaving tatters and fragments of what it meant to be able to connect with someone, to tell them you love them and actually mean it. By the end, “Bea” is reduced to mumbling her twisted version of sweet nothings but I’m still not convinced that all is lost of the well-intending New York butterfly she once was. Even in her harrowing final act, there’s love or at least something masquerading as such.

B+

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SXSW Review: HONEYMOON

“Honeymoon”
Directed by Leigh Janiak
Starring Rose Leslie, Harry Treadaway, Ben Huber, Hanna Brown
Thriller, Horror, Sci-Fi
87 Mins
United States

Honeymoon.jpg
In 1954, Colliers Magazine published Jack Finney‘s sci-fi horror serial The Body Snatchers. Since then, this fire starter novella has led to a handful of direct film adaptations (the latest being Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s 2007 The Invasion starring Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman) and dozens of spinoffs (John Carpenter‘s The Thing for instance.) But even more importantly, Finney’s creation all but gave birth to a whole subsection of genre: the infamous body invasion flick. In the years since, many filmmakers have employed this humble little niche market as an elastic stage to claim veritable scares by peddling harrowing practical visual effects and unsettling character shifts (in the best of cases) or CG sight gags and the banal formula of a group’s numbers mysteriously thinning (in the worst of cases). Director and co-writer Leigh Janiak though sees the genre as a chance to explore change on a microscopic scale, to prod just how absolutely horrifying it would be to see the one you love most temporally drained from their own body. Let’s just say, it’s not nice.

With the very talented Rose Leslie (Ygritte from Game of Thrones) and Henry Callaway at her disposal, Janiak prohibits an immense talent for directing her actors into believable territory, even under such inconceivable circumstances. From the opening montage where we meet newlyweds Bea and Paul undergoing matrimonial traditions like cake fighting (even though they forewent a real cake for cinnamon buns) and recounting the events by which they met (bad Indian food, it’s always bad Indian food!) to Rose’s fleeting misguided attempts to protect her husband from her extraterrestrial transformation (“They’ll never find you down here”) and through all the bumping of uglies in between, Leslie and Callaway sell the show as genuine.

Even on the heels of the more outrageous elements, their steadfast performances point to a unshaken understanding of their character’s respective head spaces. For the genre, it’s an uncharacteristically committed pair of performances and with Janiak jamming her cameras right in the midst of their personal space, we feel like we’re right alongside them, an equal victim of some inexplicable emotional violation.  

That is really where the true horror of these kinds of body snatching stories lies. Worse yet than seeing someone shot by a laser beam or abducted by some ethereal blue beam, there’s something infinitely more jarring to standing witness to an individual’s personality being siphoned out of them. Janiak’s film engages this process in stages. After running into what seems like the only other two people living in a ten mile radius, couple Annie and Will (who Bea just so happened to share a summer love with in the way, way back of past childhood flirtations), Janiak presents a first taste of “off-ness”. Annie’s withdrawn, confuzzled and all around off. She’s stage one of a mental virus, the foreshadow of what’s to come.

Shortly after meeting them, Paul wakes in the middle of the night to find the spot in bed next to him abandoned and cold to the touch. With harebrained suspicions of infidelity, he charges from the house only to find Bea naked, disorientated and caked in mud. Upon bringing her inside, a patch of what appears to be bug bites around her crotchal region alarms him. It’s nothing to worry about, she pleads in unconvincing manner. Instead of slamming on the brakes and seeing whatever transformation to come take place overnight, Janiak picks at her plate like a sparrow to birdseed. Like a gas leak from the brainstem, Bea isn’t replaced outright so much as reborn one blink at a time, reinvented with each breathe drawn, re-imagined with every performance of normalcy.

Honeymoon2.jpg
Watching Bea recite milestone events from her own life into the mirror mimics an earlier scene where she practices a speech to get out of engaging in post-marital carnal relations but in the space between, she’s become more drained – more a shell than the filling. She’s lost another chunk of “Bea.” It’s the hollow spaces between the words, the falsity of her gestures, the empty recitation of loving remarks that imbues Honeymoon with such an eerie tautness. Bea being such an unreliable character, we never know what’s coming next and right up to the very last moments, we never really get a grasp on how much “Bea” is left in Bea after all.

And though Honeymoon may take place at a cabin in the woods, the camp has been left at home. Janiak’s take is fatally humorless, devoutly sobering. Instead of harping on frights, she’s left us with a steamy atmosphere so thick you could cut it with a butter knife and serve it at as a wedding cake. Even the hollowed out bride and groom toppers wouldn’t be missing.  

As Bea and Paul’s deserted woodland homestead becomes an unwelcome chrysalis, we’re left with little more than the remains of an evaporating relationship. Like Bea’s special nightgown (though it’s more hoary than whory) that Paul finds in the woods after her disappearance, there’s chunks inexplicably missing, impossible to recover, chalked up to some pieceless puzzle. But even after everything, there’s still some inkling of connection left, some fleeting memory of what it means to care for each other.

Perhaps that’s her intent after all, to show us something beautiful only to take it away, leaving tatters and fragments of what it meant to be able to connect with someone, to tell them you love them and actually mean it. By the end, “Bea” is reduced to mumbling her twisted version of sweet nothings but I’m still not convinced that all is lost of the well-intending New York butterfly she once was. Even in her harrowing final act, there’s love or at least something masquerading as such.

B+

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Talking with Leigh Janiak of HONEYMOON

Leigh_Janiak.jpg
When you think of filmmakers from the sci-fi or horror genre, the first thing that pops into your mind most likely isn’t a young female director. Leigh Janiak though is here with Honeymoon to challenge that assumption. Crafting a modern sci-fi/horror film actually worth remembering, Janiak showcases her razor sharp ability to cull great performances while demonstating a kingpin-level status of economic filmography.

 

With only a few weeks of shooting (many of which were under threat of rain), four actors and a tent-sized crew, Janiak has wrung all the best elements of a genre film out, rinsed and refused to repeat, offering a genuinely eerie, wholly engaging body snatchers narrative. From our review of the film,

“Though Honeymoon may take place at a cabin in the woods, the camp has been left at home. Janiak’s take is fatally humorless, devoutly sobering. Instead of harping on frights, she’s left us with a steamy atmosphere so thick you could cut it with a butter knife and serve it at as a wedding cake. Even the hollowed out bride and groom toppers wouldn’t be missing.”

Debuting in the midnight section of this year’s SXSW festival, I had a chance to speak with Leigh about where Honeymoon came from, the challenges of working on a tight budget, and whether or not she believes in aliens.

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Firstly, I really enjoyed Honeymoon. What was your inspiration for writing this, I know you co-wrote it, was it mostly you that came up with the idea?

Leigh Janiak: Phil (Graziadei), my writing partner, we met when we were freshmen at NYU, a long time ago. When we come up with ideas, we don’t really keep track of whose idea it was first, our process is so intertwined. Basically what happened was, in 2009 or 2010, I saw Tanya Hardinger and Monsters within a couple months of one another. It jolted me out of a scriptwriting process, because we had been spending four or five years writing scripts, meeting people at production companies trying to break into the business that way. Seeing these movies inspired me. “With the next film we write, let’s actually make a movie.” If we don’t take things into our own hands, it’s going to be forever before we actually get hired to do a studio-level movie. You know, years and years and years. We went into writing Honeymoon with this idea that it was gonna be a contained genre movie, that we thought that we could get made. The idea itself grew out of this idea of exploring how something very familiar can become other, or monstrous. Picking this idea of a relationship and destroying it. Connecting to that, we thought about bigger budget ideas that we really loved, and the audience could understand. What we wanted to do was make this small, rounded, intimate version of that.

You work with such a small cast. There are four people credited working on it, but only two are you really dealing with for the most part. How does that effect the dynamic between yourself and the crew, and does it make it more of a collaborative effort between you guys?

LJ: Certainly. An interesting thing: Rose and Harry had met once before in London before they arrived on set. They got to set, maybe five days before production began. The three of us had about four days where we could maybe spend some time working together. I wouldn’t say it was rehearsal, it was more like talking through the characters, making sure we were all on the same page about where their head spaces were at certain points through the script, and really going through that process together which I think was invaluable. Rose approached Bea from a very outside perspective. Really analyzing who she was, how she thought Bea would react in a situation, there was a space between Rose the actress and Bea the character. Whereas Harry is very much more like method and he explored who Paul was from the inside-out. Initially that was a bit challenging, because when you only have two actors and they have such different approaches to their craft, you kind of have to negotiate that difference. But I think ultimately it ended up working really well with the dynamic of the characters because they are slowly drifting apart so to speak. It’s just such an intense environment when you have pretty much only two people the whole time. That took a lot of screen time for both of them and they really didn’t have a lot of down time. We shot six-day weeks so they didn’t have much time off, so the whole thing became very intimate. We all spent a lot of time together. I think it was very collaborative because of that and I just felt very lucky: they’re both so talented and they really elevated everything that they touched.

Their performances were undoubetly fantastic throughout the film. You haven’t yet released an official budget on this and probably can’t because it’s still in acquisition, but I think we can assume it was somewhat modest. Can you tell me some of the biggest challenges you ran into working on a tight budget?

LJ: Any time you’re making an indie movie, your biggest challenges are going to be time. Because you always want more time to shoot. We actually had a really nice schedule. We had 24 days which is a lot more than a lot of indie movies do. I felt that 24 days was quite comfortable except that we were shooting in North Carolina in the Spring, and we only had eight hours of darkness a night. Because we had so much night shooting, that became a real challenge. Instead of doing a twelve hour day, when we had our night work, we only had eight hours to shoot. That was difficult, because your schedule just shrinks a bit. The other main thing was that we had terrible rain, I mean it was horrible, it started raining maybe four or five days after we started shooting and then it didn’t stop for about two and a half weeks. The water levels rose, it flooded our docks, all of the roads to the cottage were completely muddy and my first VD was like pulling out his hair, we had no idea what we were going to do because we had some exterior scenes that we still needed to shoot. It was supposed to be a “happy, funny Honeymoon” and the rain just kept going. We got really lucky, because two days after we needed to get out of the location, the skies kind of cleared and we prescheduled this long shoot day where we started our night shooting at 6pm and shot all the way through the morning until like mid-afternoon so we could clean up our sunny outside scenes.

Seriously, you don’t usually hear about people complaining about not enough darkness. Before you mentioned that you grew up on horror movies. What were some of the movies that scared you and stuck with you?

LJ: It’s interesting, because I consider the genre that I like more than anything else to be sci-fi, more than horror. I have a lot of gaps in my knowledge of horror, generally, but it’s funny because my first horror movie I saw maybe in like 5th grade, and I was having a sleep-over party and I really wanted to have a horror movie because that’s what all my friends were doing, like people would be watching Chucky and I really wanted to compete with that, so my Mom said “I’m not showing a horror movie, you’re at our house.” It wasn’t just that we were a little young for it, but, what she did was she rented Psycho, which is like, way worse than any of those 80’s slasher movies, this is like 1988, 1989. She’d say “those are just slashing for gore! I’m gonna rent you Psycho” so that was extremely traumatic and awful. So those were the kind of horror movies that I began to appreciate, the Hitchockian or Palanskian, which I watched a lot in junior high and stuff. Those I still consider my biggest influences horror-wise, like Palanski for sure, Kubrick, even Hitchcock as well but I don’t really see that applying to my style. But I certainly do aspire to do more like Palanski and Kubrick and stuff.

You say that you’re more of a sci-fi person and even if it’s not ever explicitly stated in the movie, we’re led to believe that there are some kind of extraterrestrial creatures who are starting some inklings of an invasion or something. Did you do much research into alien life-forms, or did you talk to any people who maybe claimed that they had been abducted?

LJ: No, not really. I’d say that mostly I have a preoccupation with aliens, personally. Like I said, in really thinking about those bigger invasion movies, even things like Independence Day, it would always happen: there would be this big giant bang and suddenly all of the ships are overhead and everyone’s leaving. I love Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it’s one of my favorite alien-invasion movies because it does feel more grounded. I like the way Richard Dreyfuss’ character begins, it feels like he’s just going crazy and just with the dirt making the mountain, I love that shot so much. So, for Honeymoon it was really just trying to put myself in the position where most realistically we could capture that this began on a smaller, slower scale. In the movie, the idea is that Bea and Annie are thought to be first beginnings of this wider invasion .

The last project that you worked on was the Europa Report, even though you weren’t directing that, it also deals with life outside of what we know. Regardless of what you might refer to it as, do you believe in “aliens?”

LJ: I absolutely believe in them and in extraterrestrial life. Obviously, I don’t know what that could mean, it could mean a variety of things. Whether that’s a bacteria or arsenic-based life form, but I certainly believe that it’s naïve to not believe that there’s something else that exists.

Looking forward on your career, do you want to stick with the sci-fi genre or would you like to maybe try something new? What’s next on your plate?

LJ: We’re working on a few different ideas right and they are all sort of like walking this sci-fi, horror space. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t be interested in trying something else too, but I grew up reading sci-fi. The Wrinkle in Time books, are the first books that I really remember affecting me in a way, from then on I really became obsessed with thinking about how science can really affect narrative and open up imagination. Often in a terrible way, which I like to explore. I think that I’m going to stick with this genre, but it’s not like I have any kind of rule. If any other projects or ideas came up that I liked, I would obviously open to doing that too.

One of the things that you do really well in the film, both from a writing and directorial standpoint, is that you don’t really set out to scare us, so much as just create this really moody, really eerie atmosphere that’s anchored by these really well-written, fleshed out characters. That’s a really nice surprise in a horror or sci-fi movie because at this point we’re so used to shallowly-written characters and a jump-scare every fifteen minutes or so. With Honeymoon do you see this well written character drama as the response to this slew of horror characters that are so often under-written and under-developed? Is this your “solution”?

LJ: Definitely. For me, you can watch people get splattered across screen, starting from minute two to the end, and that’s entertainment, and it’s great and it does a very specific thing, but for me when I am just aiming for more is that creeping awfulness. I really just wanted to make as much as possible, the audience feel uncomfortable and bad, just that sense of incredible eeriness as you described it. To me, that’s achieved most easily if you can bring your characters in close. Let your characters interact with the audience and understand who they are, so it will mean more when they’re falling apart.

Are you actively working on a next project right now? Do you just have a lot of balls in the air?

LJ: My writing partner and I have two ideas that we’re really working on right now, and those are in the early stages. We’re not almost done with the script or anything like that, but definitely I’m hoping that one of those will become my next film. But hopefully sci-fi will open up a lot of opportunities since we’re also playing at Tribeca. We’re also exploring other projects as well.

Can you tell us anything about those two project ideas?

LJ: Not right now. I hate talking about things until I’m 100% confident in the iteration that it’s going to live in!

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