HONEYMOON: Finding Meaning in Leigh Janiak’s Heartbreaking Film
By Harper Smith
Warning: The following contains major spoilers for the film Honeymoon (2014).
One day, you wake up and it is there. An uneasy feeling of looking at the person next to you and feeling like perhaps you are looking at a stranger. The panic is unparalleled; the pain of seeing what once was so beautiful and loving, what once was so profoundly blissful to you and seems so alien and absent, is a pain that I would wish on nobody. It’s terror-inducing to find yourself holding onto the memories of what once was and not what it is that can become harmful to one’s own survival and mental stability.
Leigh Janiak’s wonderful film Honeymoon (2014) illustrates this consuming horror and pain of holding onto something or someone that no longer loves you like once before.
When we begin Honeymoon, we are introduced, via a home-recorded video, to Bea and Paul (a set of wonderful performances by Rose Leslie and Harry Treadaway), a newlywed couple who are taking a trip to Bea’s family’s vacation home deep within the woods. The couple seems in love and full of wonder as they begin their trip. They have a naivety about a wide-open future. There is something special between the couple, and as viewers, we are allowed to fall in love with their story before a single ounce of strife is injected.
During a night at the vacation home, Paul finds Bea in the woods, naked and completely disoriented, unaware of why she is there. Almost immediately, Paul becomes confused because Bea’s behavior is out of the ordinary. As time passes, Bea finds it incredibly difficult to do the normal day-to-day things she used to do. Paul attempts to help her, but it only adds to his own pain of slowly seeing someone he loves become someone else. This is the film’s major mystery, and though Honeymoon eventually leads into a Body Snatchers take as a metaphor for a deteriorating relationship, the real charm of the film is how precisely it deals with it.
There are times in life when we don’t know someone we thought we knew because life has its way of changing people over time. We spend so much time trying to hold onto what once was that we fail to see what is in front of us — the person we loved is changed by life itself and its many situations. Like Paul in the film, we spend so much time trying to conserve the past by holding onto it with tightly clenched hands as it slips out of our palms. And then one day, the person we wake up next to isn’t the person we fell in love with, and the obsessive desire to hold onto that leads to nothing more than our downfall.
As the film progresses, Paul becomes more and more adamant about getting Bea back, he allows himself to be consumed by it until the film’s somewhat bleak ending. Bea drowns Paul, killing the person she once loved, and becoming who she was slowly transforming into.
Janiak said that while writing the film, she wanted to illustrate how even the smallest events can put a wedge between people. This is what makes Honeymoon so damn special. Sometimes it’s not even the big things that lead people to shift away from each other and themselves; sometimes it’s a series of small things all working together to create a perfect storm of pain and dysfunction. As life has shown so many of us, sometimes it’s not enough to want something to work out and last, and sometimes, once things are to a certain point, we can’t go back and fix what was broken. It’s the little things that all lead to bigger things. It’s the blind naiveté that allows us to miss the cracks when they form, and when we do see them, they have already split the seams into something that cannot be helped. The way we deal with that horror-filled reality allows us to either learn from our mistakes and grow better or allow those mistakes to consume us until we lose ourselves in the process. It’s a sad, painful reality, but like happiness, sadness, hope, and hopelessness, it’s an inevitable part of life. Loss, grief, change, and how we deal with it determines our future.
I found so much of myself in Honeymoon. In the past, I’ve tried to keep something alive while refusing to accept that it simply was not. We see the people we adore become someone else and, honestly, there is nothing wrong with that — our lives dictate who we are and sometimes people change due to various situations in life. While we may not understand or want it, change is a part of life. We lose people to the passage of time whether physical or emotional.
Honeymoon is a thrilling breath of fresh air, but it is also a sad story of grief, and loss and how both of those things can lead us to our demise, whether metaphorically or, in the film’s case, literally. The pain of holding onto what once was keeps increasing until we don’t recognize ourselves anymore. It isn’t about just your loved one changing but how we react to that change, and how destructive it can become. While it is a story of loss, it’s also a story of letting go no matter how difficult it may be because it’s all we can do to save ourselves. Honeymoon tells us we fall apart by not letting go.
Janiak’s Honeymoon is a film that reaches so deeply into your soul that you feel, perhaps, through the alchemy of storytelling and cinema, stories like this one were meant just for us. 🩸
About
Harper Smith is a film journalist and composer, hailing from the Central Valley of California. For over a decade now, they have annoyed readers of many sites and magazines with an overabundance of Halloween 4 love and personal essays. Visit their website Rainydaysforghosts.bandcamp.com.
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