Honeycomb

SLAMDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2022 REVIEW! 21-year-old director Avalon Fast’s untamed debut feature, Honeycomb, is a Canadian horror film that is Moonrise Kingdom meets Switchblade Sisters. A group of girls in their late teens move into an abandoned house they find hidden in the woods. Once they settle in, things get crazy.

Millie (Rowan Wales), Willow (Sophie Bawks-Smith), Jules (Jillian Frank), Leader (Destini Stewart), and Vicky (Mari Geraghty) set up their own society separate from the outside world, replete with laws and rituals. They keep the location secret, only bringing dumb boys there blindfolded. They sleep in a pile on the floor with a rule that hook-ups be done outside on a mattress. They put on red dresses and have a candle-lit alter where they pray to a painting of a girl with bees in her hair.

“…girls in their late teens move into an abandoned house they found hidden in the woods.”

They also have a rule that keeps the peace called “suitable revenge.” To settle a dispute quickly, if one girl wrongs another, the victim is allowed to inflict an equal amount of harm on the perpetrator. The longer the girls live by the vicious laws of their hive, the darker their savage teenage wasteland becomes.

I love it when the people rise up and make movies outside the grime-encrusted dream factories. After graduating high school, Fast skipped higher education and moved to Vancouver, a mecca for female horror directors. She shot Honeycomb during the summer of 2019 on Cortes Island in British Columbia for no money, with all her friends helping out for free. It is a rare instance where a woman’s coming of age story is actually made by women who are coming of age. An older person’s insight when reflecting on becoming an adult cannot match the intensity radiated from a young person going through it. The children have made a film about themselves by themselves. And the children are insane.