Wife Swap: Stay with sinister cabin-in-the-woods horror drama "Honeymoon"

Honeymoon (2014)

87 min., rated R.

The woods is always a surefire setting to tell a horror story that plays with isolation, especially when cell reception needs to be rendered useless. Low-budget chamber horror-drama "Honeymoon" isn't just another excuse to throw gallons of karo syrup on a couple of nubile kids and make gore fans stand up and notice. Rather, it's a deliberate disintegration of a relationship, a nightmarish metaphor for interpersonal alienation and paranoia, and a horrific twist on the end of the "honeymoon phase." Leigh Janiak makes her directorial debut, working from a screenplay she co-wrote with Phil Graziadei, and sure knows how to skillfully blend an empathetic, increasingly tense relationship drama with straight-up horror. Executed with intimacy, unease and a growing storm of doom and gloom, this minimalist, slow-burning something-in-the-woods chiller is brief and contained at 87 minutes, but also demonstrably haunting. To read the rest of the review, go to Diabolique Magazine.

Grade: B