In Devereux Milburn’s Honeydew, the window-dressings of dustbowl farmland hospitality flakes off to reveal a disturbing underbelly; one crusted with human sacrifice, religious devotion, and, more likely than not, a good-sized serving of man-meat. The flame has been long extinguished between Sam (Steven Spielberg’s son Sawyer Spielberg ) and Rylie (Malin Barr), a waiter/aspiring actor and botanist graduate student respectively, but the two head to rural Massachusetts with plans to camp out and do some research for Rylie’s thesis on a medieval wheat-based neurodegenerative disease. When they’re forced off the property of a grumpy old timer named Eulis in the middle of the night only to discover that their car will not start, they seek assistance at a nearby farmstead. You can probably guess where this goes next.

The couple wind up hostages, er houseguests, of the eldery Karen (Barbara Kingsley), who hopes to fatten them up with mystery meat, sautéed greens, and frosted cupcakes for reasons that are all-too obvious. The entertaining Kingsley proves a wild-eyed, frenetic jolt of energy to a film that has otherwise been domineered by low-energy, lackluster performances, Barr and Spielberg failing wildly to convey even the most basic sense of character. We simply don’t know much about these characters beyond the basic background drops the script from Milburn provides and it’s often hard to decipher whether the strain on their relationship is the result of the complex push-and-pull of competing career aspirations or just simply poor thespian chemistry. When situations worsen, we lack the basis for this relationship to believe their bond and all the selfless sacrifices that follow read as false.

As it becomes more and more obvious that the steaks that the ostensibly-sweet old Karen is serving up are not likely cow-based, one doesn’t necessarily root for our protagonists to not wind up on the wrong side of cannibalism. That’s a problem, though one not necessarily all that unfamiliar to the genre. Though the script doesn’t do them any favors, the blame is squarely shouldered by Barr and Spielberg, who in his acting debut has not demonstrated anything resembling star power, instead redirecting the spotlight on all that nepotism hard at work. Their becoming entrees doesn’t move the dial become they simply make zero impact as flesh and blood characters.
Time has always shifted to accommodate the agrarian folks though Honeydew takes more advantage of time than daylight savings, regularly allowing for scenes to drag on to exactly twice the length they ought to. Rather than this add depth of atmosphere or growing tension to the scene work, Milburn’s tendency to stretch moments out like taffy instead only tests the viewer’s patience, while speaking to the underlying fallowness of the material. While the basic premise of Honeydew could potentially prove fertile ground for a geriatric spin on Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Hostel, as written, it is instead hollow; a remarkably thin experiment in stitching together familiar horrific kidnapping tropes without offering a compelling conceit for the narrative surgery.

Milburn attempts to comment on the juxtaposition of salt-of-the-earth ruralites and manicured city slickers, particularly in Trumpian times, but I can’t for the life of me sort exactly what metaphor she’s trying to land on. There’s some statement about how religious mania intersects with all this but, again, I come up dry when I try to figure out precisely what it’s all suppose to mean or be commenting on. When Lena Dunham shows up as – to quote the similarly depraved Australian kidnapping horror feature Wolf Creek – “a head on a stick”, one begins to wonder if this should all be taken as a bad joke. After all, the playful score – comprised of cheek pops, triangles, and slide whistles – and experimental editorial choices (which occasionally splices the frame into “his” and “her” sections of the screen) seems to directly contradict the shadowy aesthetic choices and occasional gruesome tilt towards torture porn. If this is an attempt at dark humor, the joke simply doesn’t land upright. Impaled instead atop a pike of questionable intent.

Taken as a whole, Honeydew does show a filmmaker with some unrefined promise. Despite her interesting choices not always working out, there are compelling and handsomely-mounted moments of horror in Honeydew that’ll fan genre lovers craving for demented mayhem. That it ultimately goes exactly how you might expect is a detriment to the experience, especially considering the film’s entirely unnecessary one-hour-and-forty-six-minute runtime. The film from Milburn also has the unfortunate side effect of proving that the younger Spielberg probably doesn’t have much of a future in front of the camera.

CONCLUSION: Old farm people are supposedly scary as sin in Devereux Milburn’s hostage-horror film ‘Honeydew’, a debut handicapped by lacking performances and an unjustifiably elongated runtime that fails to offer much novelty to the subgenre of young city folk kidnapped by malevolent bumpkins.