Honeymoon has the unfortunate luck to be released so soon after The One I Love, which largely succeeds where Honeymoon fails. Honeymoon tackles the idea of love and do you really know the person that you love and trust. It is a male nightmare-something happens to the woman that you love; she withdraws from you; you can’t protect her and you slowly seem to become an awful person in your efforts to find out what is wrong, but you’re not because there is something wrong. The acting is amazing. I never doubted for a second that the main characters loved each other so the character shift was distinct and effective. Honeymoon suffers from narrative failures by giving too much away too early and providing a back-story that actually detracts from what unfolds on the screen. If you are familiar with Rose Leslie from Game of Thrones, you will not be surprised by the denouement. Also the sci-fi genre smashing with romantic drama genre also tips the audience too much to the director’s hand. I have yet to see Monsters though it is in the queue, but I have seen Tiny Furniture, which I loved, but I fail to see its influence on Honeymoon’s director. Honeymoon reaches for Cronenberg by confronting menstrual issues, but fails to really go there and make the viewer truly squirm with discomfort. Honeymoon is a deeply flawed movie with pacing problems, but is still worth watching since I enjoy any attempt at injecting sci-fi elements into dramas.
SPOILERS
The female director is clearly trying to subvert the Rosemary’s Baby genre by making the husband a victim of the wife, but she mixes her metaphors and muddies the water. Before the incident happens, I wondered if the wife had some sort of dark childhood past since she kept talking about killing things with her bare hands. While I don’t mind that alien abduction and impregnation, i.e. rape, is the catalyst for her change, I think that it was a mistake to make the wife seem so potentially sinister early in the movie. Also I think that the earlier womb comment, though foreboding, was clunky. The mystical pregnancy trope could have worked, but somehow it fell short when combined with rape. I think that Honeymoon would have been more effective if it decided to address a rape metaphor or a pregnancy metaphor, i.e. how men feel extraneous, unneeded and even threatened by their wives during pregnancy and how the wives’ personality changes significantly, but by doing both, it was too much for the narrative to handle. After the initial womb comment and declaring that she didn’t want a baby, if they were still on the honeymoon, and she suddenly thought she was pregnant, but happy about the whole thing while keeping the alien abduction device and deflecting her husbands’ advances explicitly because of pregnancy, that could have worked. OR ditch the womb comment, keep the rape metaphor and headache excuses for not having sex with her husband, but increase her furtive attempts to abort and keep him clueless.
