Fantastic Fest 2025 Review: Honey Bunch

Grace Glowicki leads Sims-Fewer & Mancinelli’s haunting sophomore feature Honey Bunch.

For their sophomore feature, filmmakers Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli return with Honey Bunch, a psychological horror that blends body trauma, fractured memory, and marital tension into one surreal descent. Following their acclaimed debut Violation (Shudder, TIFF 2020, later Sundance and SXSW), the duo once again prove their command of intimate yet unsettling storytelling.

The film follows Diana (Grace Glowicki), a woman recovering from a coma and lingering injuries, who arrives with her husband (Ben Petrie) at an isolated care facility offering experimental treatments. As Diana’s memories return in fragments, the line between recovery and manipulation blurs, forcing her to question not only the walls around her but the very foundation of her marriage.

What makes Honey Bunch stand out isn’t just its unsettling imagery or the eerie atmosphere of the facility, but the performances. Glowicki shoulders an immense task, playing variations of the same character with startling versatility. Jason Isaacs and Katie Dickie bring a brooding presence to the ensemble, sharpening the sense that the house itself is steeped in control, secrecy, and dread.

Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli are unafraid to explore love as something grotesque, fragile, and obsessive. As they’ve described, this is “a twisted love story. Not a fairytale.” That ethos radiates throughout the film, where devotion curdles into domination, and intimacy becomes another form of violence.

Following its world premiere at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival and now its U.S. premiere at Fantastic Fest, Honey Bunch continues its festival run before its Shudder debut in 2026. It’s a film that thrives on tension and ambiguity, often pulling the rug out from under the viewer, but it’s also deeply emotional — an interrogation of what people will endure, or destroy, in the name of love.

Verdict: Honey Bunch is bold, atmospheric, and deeply uncomfortable in all the ways a sophomore horror feature should be. The result is a challenging, unsettling, and memorable work that cements Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli as two of the most vital voices in contemporary genre cinema.

Rating: 3.5/5

Directed by

Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli

Grace Glowicki, Ben Petrie, Jason Isaacs, and Katie Dickie