Now Add Honey

Now Add Honey feels like three seasons of a sitcom crammed into an hour-and-a-half, with all the jokes removed.

The plot loosely follows Honey (Lucy Fry), teenage star of the Monkey Girl franchise, as she comes to Australia in the company of her controlling, painkiller-addicted mother Beth (Portia de Rossi). Where Honey goes, disaster follows - and if there is one word which sums up this film, it's tragedy. Endless, overblown tragedy. The movie is so rife with it that often scenes haven't even finished before another incident strikes, resulting in a breathless progression of accident into embarrassing misinterpretation into awkward confrontation that left this reviewer feeling emotionally and mentally exhausted by the half-way point. The soundtrack struggles to keep up too, switching between whimsical upbeat indie-folk stylings and heavy brooding songs so quickly it resulted in auditory whiplash.

Worse, any sympathy you might have for the majority of characters as they're battered by these slings and arrows swiftly evaporates through a combination of repulsive personality traits and most problems being a consequence of their own stupidity. Honey herself is a giggling Hollywood stereotype without any complexity or redeeming qualities. The film itself suffers from a plenitude of wholly pointless sub-plots with no resolution and pockets of humour are few and far between. Unless your tolerance for farcical, frustrating and ill-paced drama is unusually high, steer clear of Now Add Honey.