Why watching Blood Honey is like living on Venus

Blood Honey

Pardon the astronomical metaphor, but watching a movie that has no atmosphere is like living on Mars. Blood Honey, from Canadian director Jeff Kopas, sometimes seems to be nothing but atmosphere; it’s like living on Venus.

The opening scene sets the tone as well as the story; when Jenibel was a little girl, she watched her mother commit suicide, plunging to her death from a water tower behind the family’s rural Ontario hunting lodge.

Years later, the nowgrown Jenibel (Shenae Grimes-Beech) has spent years away from the place, but she’s back to try to make amends with her father, Marvin (Gil Bellows), dying of some obscure disease.

Jenibel quickly reconnects with an oddball assortment of Northern Gothic types, including her brother (Kenneth Mitchell) and the local doctor (Don McKellar), all of whom seem to enjoy swilling mason jars full of locally produced honey wine. (The film was originally titled The Hive, which is also Marvin’s pet name for the lodge.)

Jenibel suffers from waking dreams that lend the film an air of horror, while everyone else has a habit of going silent in mid-conversation, with every scene punctuated by a too-on-the-nose score from Amin Bhatia. (I’ve heard Interstellar Suite, Amin; you can do better!) It culminates in one of those a-ha! climaxes that is meant to make you question everything you’ve seen thus far, though it may just leave you scratching your head.

Kopas’s last film, 2011’s An Insignificant Harvey, suffered from some unfortunate similarities to a superior movie called The Station Agent. Blood Honey, while original and even audacious in its plotting, feels a little too generic in style to be memorable. Somewhere in this filmmaker’s wheelhouse is a Goldilocks-zone film, but I’m still waiting to see it.

Blood Honey opens Sept. 1 in Toronto, Sept. 8 in Vancouver, and Sept. 12 in Calgary.