How Canadian Directors Making a Revenge Thriller Found Romance on Set: “Love Is Unpredictable”
Romance for indie filmmakers Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer blossomed in the most unexpected of places — as they shot their 2020 debut feature Violation, a relentlessly violent and gory revenge drama set in cottage-country Canada.
“After making our first film, which really dealt with trauma and was very dark, very painful to make and really delved into the dark recesses of our minds, we wanted to make something that was about love,” Sims-Fewer tells The Hollywood Reporter ahead of Honey Bunch, their sophomore feature, having its world premiere in Berlin on Feb. 18.
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In their first feature, which bowed at the Toronto Film Festival, Sims-Fewer played a young woman in an unhappy marriage who, with her sister and their husbands, stays at a secluded cottage where unspoken traumas and upsetting sexual violence are gradually revealed.
But on Honey Bunch, the Canadian filmmakers deliberately toned down the dark, bloody material of their first feature. “We actually became a couple during the making of [Violation]. So what really inspired Honey Bunch was wanting to make something about a couple, and wanting to make something about what it means to commit to someone wholeheartedly, and the kind of fear and excitement that all mingle in together when you make that commitment,” Sims-Fewer explains.
Which is not to say that Honey Bunch is a rom com. The film features Grace Glowicki playing Diana, a young woman who wakes from a coma with fragmented memories. She and her husband, Homer, played by Ben Petrie, seek experimental treatments at a remote medical clinic. But as questionable procedures attempt to restore her memory, Diana finds her marriage challenged as she begins to question Homer’s real intentions for taking her to the facility in the first place.
Celebrity couples who fall in love on movie sets are certainly not new to Hollywood, and romance for the Canadian filmmakers followed a string of short films they made together starting in 2015. “I think we were both quite scared. We’d already made a bunch of short films together and we were both afraid. I know I was afraid,” Sims-Fewer admits.
For Mancinelli, Honey Bunch is about what follows for two people who fall for one another. “Love is unpredictable, and part of what we’re exploring in this film is how we can deconstruct common ideas of love, this idea of a soul mate or the right one for you,” he argues.
And Glowicki and Petrie were ideal as the Honey Bunch leads as they are married in the film and in real life. “We were really attracted to this idea of a real couple who really understands what it means to be in a long-term committed relationship,” Mancinelli adds.
The filmmakers toy with audience expectations about the main Honey Bunch characters as Diana’s failed memory is slowly restored via questionable medical experiments, and impressions of her marriage come into focus.
“At the very beginning, you may see one thing, and then perhaps later, it really forces you to see maybe a different perspective, another side of the situation. The challenge is the way you kind of evaluate these characters and the story itself,” Mancinelli explains.
Sims-Fewer adds that Honey Bunch was designed to reveal a new look for the Violation directors. “Whereas we’d shown a very particular side of ourselves [with Violation], people were seeing this one thing: the trauma filmmakers. And we wanted to explore a part of ourselves that was different, but no less potent,” she explains.
Honey Bunch also stars Jason Isaacs, Kate Dickie and Julian Richings, a veteran of the horror genre. The Canadian indie, set in the 1970s, pays homage to top horror films of that era, including Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the sci-fi horror classic directed by Philip Kaufman.
To get that retro look, the directors used vintage camera lenses for a slightly dizzying look that helped convey Diana and her fuzzy memories as she recalls her marriage. “It’s something that maybe is a bit unexpected and maybe a little of a strange aesthetic to get used to for audiences of a thriller. But that’s something we found very exciting,” Sims-Fewer says.
Ahead of the world premiere of Honey Bunch in Berlin, the filmmakers want their latest movie to spark conversations with festival audiences, ahead of a commercial release.
“As filmmakers, all we can hope for is the film gets seen by a lot of people and it’s interesting enough that people want to talk about it,” Mancinelli says. “I always hope people see something of themselves in it, because we put something of ourselves in it,” Sims-Fewer adds
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