Honey – Overview/ Review (with Spoilers)

Overview

An angel of death gets too close to one “patient” and it leads to her rethinking the path she set herself on.

Trigger Warning(s): Suicide (Discussion)

Review (with Spoilers) – Below

Characters & Story

Irene (Jasmine Trinca), aka Honey, has for 3 years been helping the terminally sick euthanize themselves. However, upon meeting a man, named Carlo (Carlo Cecchi), who is more so depressed than terminally ill, she begins to question a lot of things in her life. Such as if helping people kill themselves is as noble as she thinks, whether she is on the right moral ground to be even a part of someone ending their life and, ultimately, whether these people really want to die at all?

Praise

For this film, it is more so the idea of death and morality which are worth highlighting more than anything else. Which isn’t to say the film is boring. Trinca makes for an interesting lead, and arguably the story outside of the euthanizing bits can be appealing.

Criticism

However, I must admit I found it hard to fully dedicate my focus to this movie. Which isn’t good for a movie which requires subtitles to understand. For while Trinca had the same sort of appeal someone like Lea Seydoux has, at the same time the story splitting the focus between her relationship with a married man, Carlo, her as a daughter, and her as a drug smuggling euthanizing agent, it just didn’t seem cohesive.

Which isn’t to say she couldn’t have been some complex young woman who had different facets to her life; it is just that while Carlo does open her mind to how her occupation isn’t benevolent, at the same time there is no strong connection made so her realization feels as important to you as it does to her. For, and maybe this is just me, I think there wasn’t enough effort into her being shown as naive and young. Instead, we get to see she is young by her body, her messing around with a married man and trying to not be attached, and then her naivety is shown, or perhaps discovered, through Carlo who awakens her to the idea that her pity for the terminally ill is more so a bias to those whose sickness can be seen. Among the idea that she is doing people a favor, despite a high cost to assist them to die.

Overall: TV Viewing

I will admit this is really on the border of Skip It and TV Viewing, but something about Trinca just draws you in enough to finish the film. Especially when it comes to her interactions with Cecchi. However, what keeps this from being a firm TV Viewing, much less Worth Seeing, is that she only brings you in just enough and doesn’t make you fall in love with the story, or even her character to a point. If anything, the movie presents an interesting idea, and then in the pursuit of making the female lead complex, they bog her down with her being a mistress, the father/ daughter bits, and it ultimately doesn’t feel like they are trying to create a multi-dimensional person, but more so someone who seems interesting on paper.