[Editorial] “Where Is My wife?”: Losing Yourself In (And To) Sexual Trauma In Honeymoon

You awaken in the middle of the woods. The night air burns cold on your naked skin. Your nightgown lays torn and discarded at your feet. Bite marks encrust your inner thighs. Unfamiliar footprints surround you. Your husband stares helplessly into your eyes, waiting for an explanation. It’s freezing. What are you doing here? You remember a bright light. You begin to scream. 

I did a lot of unusual things after I was sexually assaulted. 

I forgot my favourite colour. I developed a stutter. I collected jars of rainwater. My friends had to stop me from adopting a cat. I wouldn’t leave my home without exactly three spare house keys. I only ate custard tarts and canned tuna for dinner (not, like, mixed together, don’t worry).

I also watched Leigh Janiak’s Honeymoon (2014) on repeat every single day. I woke up, went to work, came home, and watched Honeymoon. I would watch it again and again through the nights until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, often waking up to the glare of the title menu the next morning. The disc stayed in my DVD player, unmoved, for four months.

To this day, I still like to watch Honeymoon . That part is me. That part, I recognise. 

Honeymoon is about two young newlyweds, Paul (Harry Treadaway) and Bea (Rose Leslie), who are celebrating their honeymoon at Bea’s family’s cabin in the Canadian wilderness. One night, Paul awakens to find Bea missing from their bed and discovers her naked and disorientated in the middle of the forest. What happened to her? The signs of rape are all there (torn nightgown, unfamiliar footprints, vaginal trauma, the remains of a viscous fluid at the scene) but Janiak never offers a conclusive  answer. This absence should be our first clue; trauma, after all, is the unsaid and the unsayable.

In Honeymoon, trauma is a secret language of diary entries, blinking lights like morse code, and forgetting the proper word for ‘suitcase’. It is not a language you can learn, only word-vomit out in sobs and retches. Perhaps you’ll understand this language. Perhaps you won’t. Honeymoon is a horror film that forces its audience into the perspective of a man who doesn’t understand how his wife overnight turns into a monster neither one of them recognises.

This is an article by a woman who does. 

It’s a hot summer morning and you are on your way to meet a colleague for coffee. The sunlight burns bright against the white pavement. You squint behind dark sunglasses and wonder if a black dress was weather appropriate. Head in the clouds and eyes straining, you barely notice the man coming towards you. You remember a bright light.

Representations of rape and sexual assault in horror cinema are mostly regulated to the rape-revenge canon. Horror cinema is an apt medium for showcasing both the violence of rape – Deliverance (1972), The Hills Have Eyes (1977, 2006), A Serbian Film (2010) – and its grisly punishment – The Last House on the Left (1972, 2009), Silent Hill (2006), Revenge (2017). Rape-revenge films, in one way or another, explore how the complexities of justice may impede or aid healing from sexual violence. But Honeymoon is about issues less grand than justice and the rule of law, opting instead for a study in daily life and relationships in the wake of sexual trauma. 

If trauma is defined as “an event that is outside the human range of experience”, Honeymoon literalises this human/paranormal divide in its depiction of rape as a supernatural intrusion on the safety of normal, everyday life; what is at stake in the film is not so much truth, justice, and the American way, but remembering how to make French toast and a cup of coffee for breakfast. A film shocking and complex for its focus on the mundane and simple, Honeymoon occupies a more liminal space than traditional horror cinema about sexual violence by presenting fear without catharsis, trauma without justice, and rape without revenge.

Your husband carries you back inside and sits you down on the couch. He’s frazzled. Panicked. “I’m OK. Please, it’s OK”, you beg, reaching for his hand. Why won’t he just come sit with you? Eyes wild with fear, stumbling over every syllable, and darting to and fro he asks, of all things, where your nightgown is. 

Honeymoon opens on a video-diary log. Bea and Paul share with the audience the stories of their first date and engagement proposal, both events notably connected by sickness. On their first date, Paul came down with food poisoning and so Bea brought him back to her apartment to take care of him. The proposal was supposed to happen on a camping trip, but Bea got sick and so Paul made a tent out of sheets in their living room. The audience’s first introduction to Bea and Paul is of a couple bonded by a shared resilient spirit. They are married because they quite literally were there for each other in sickness and in health. Not only do Bea and Paul manage to overcome the struggles they faced in their past, but they manage to translate what should be embarrassing or unfortunate stories of illness into jokey, light-hearted anecdotes for their wedding diary (“Fuck you, Indian food”, says Paul with a triumphant smile). What love and resilience accomplish in Honeymoon’s opening sequence is an act of rewriting.

Aptly then, Honeymoon is a film particularly disturbing through its use of inversion and parallel. If Bea and Paul, through their language of resilience, can rewrite the bumps in the road of their relationship into heart-warming stories of care and devotion, then rape accomplishes the inverse: it turns the good things into bad. All the more insidious and heart-breaking is that, after Bea is attacked, the film inverts traditional marriage rituals from moments of bliss to danger and fear. Paul carrying Bea ‘across the threshold’ at the beginning of the film becomes Paul carrying Bea back into the cabin after he finds her naked and semiconscious in the woods. Paul pretending to tie Bea to the bed after sex, joking what a “dirty girl” she is, and blowing raspberries on her tummy becomes Paul actually tying Bea down (again, a marriage metaphor), Bea covered in blood in a grimy white t-shirt, and Paul removing an alien creature from Bea’s womb. Not only is there no protocol for sexual trauma in the script that is wedding vows (for richer or poorer, raped in the middle of a forest or…?), but it is also an event that cannot be translated from trauma into a funny anecdote to tell in a wedding speech. Sexual trauma translates the most minute details of daily routine, be they dull or joyous, into objects of terror. It is an infectious yet numbing language – a tune stuck in your head that you cannot remember the lyrics to, a word teetering on the tip of your tongue.

The man walks faster in your direction. You notice a flyer in his hand and cringe (please don’t ask me to sign a petition or embrace Jesus as my lord and saviour). You try to walk out of his path, but he follows your step. You move the opposite way, but he mirrors you once more. He comes closer whichever way you go. You are cornered by an ugly grey cement pot. “I’m sorry, I have to go”, you say. They are your last words before everything changes. 

Honeymoon’s second act is a jarring tonal shift from the first. Upon their arrival at Bea’s family cabin, the newlyweds are idyllically in love and happy. They laugh. They play. They have a lot of sex. They are almost never shown apart, even in close-up shots. And we, as the audience, begin through Honeymoon’s repetition of dialogue, to learn their language, their private jokes and pet names. Their signature way of saying “I love you” is Paul’s cue, “I love you, honeybee”, which Bea returns with a buzzing sound, placing two fingers on his lips. Like Bea’s nickname, the couple are almost sickeningly sweet together. 

But the ‘honeymoon phase’ of the film, as it were, is interrupted by Bea’s attack in the woods. She begins acting very unusually, shifting the film’s tone from a sickly sweetness to a nauseating suspicion. The audience are placed into Paul’s point of view as the camera lurks behind corners watching Bea practice excuses for not wanting to have sex in the mirror, watching Bea write the same phrases over and over again in her journal only to slam it shut when she notices Paul peering over her shoulder, watching Bea forget how to make French toast and grind coffee beans. We feel Paul’s alienation as the film (and Bea) refuses to answer what has happened. Infidelity is more plausible to him than rape. Rape is unthinkable. Rape is unsayable. Their fall from grace is marked most woefully when Paul attempts to rekindle their intimacy – to rewrite this newfound tragedy with love and resilience – by speaking their language. “This is me. I love you so much, but I need you to talk to me,” Paul says, “I love you. I love you, honeybee, what do you say?”. But Bea can no longer remember her line. As she stares blankly at her husband, their language has been replaced with the silence of trauma.  

Your name is Bea. Your husband is Paul. Your home is New York. Your favourite colour is blue. You’re allergic to hazelnuts. You don’t enjoy the taste of ketchup. Your birthday is January 25th 1983. Your name is Bea. Your husband is Paul. Your name is Bea. Your husband is Paul. Your name is Bea. Your husband is…is…is--

Honeymoon’s final act is a devastating look at navigating romantic relationships post-sexual assault and a cementing of the film’s thinking about perhaps the most devastating aspect of trauma: losing yourself. The problem with losing yourself becomes all the more complicated by marriage when one is emotionally and legally transformed from a single to the other half of a pair. The distress Paul feels from Bea’s new emotional distance is not that she has become cruel, angry, rude, or anything otherwise negative, it’s simply that she is no longer Bea. Like the game with dice the couple play together, Paul and Bea have become “two of a kind” rather than “a pair” – a subtle but important distinction. “Why can’t we just be normal? Why can’t we just be us?” Paul laments and Honeymoon demonstrates the heart-breaking potential of trauma to completely alienate you from yourself as well as the people that love you; Bea is no longer the person Paul fell in love with and, worse, he cannot fall in love with this new Bea. What trauma has done to this couple is like wearing odd socks: the issue is not that they look bad, per se, but that they do not match. And so, rather than subject Paul to the monstrous, un-Bea creature she has become, Bea murders Paul, tying an anchor to his ankles and dropping him at the bottom of a lake. The film’s final words echo a sentiment Bea expressed in the video diary at the beginning: “Before I was alone, but now I’m not.” ‘Till death, indeed.

For the next two years, you will tell your story over and over again. To police. To lawyers. To a magistrate. To your family. To counsellors and psychologists. You talk about it until you are blue in the face, like Bea in the final sequence of Honeymoon. Your favourite colour is black. You are an award-winning public speaker. You hate the rain. You’re allergic to cats. There is always a spare house key hidden in your front garden should you get locked out. Trying new foods brings you joy. And yet? It will never be like it was because you will never be you again. You can never find a place for all the things you cannot say. I’m sorry, but you had to go. 

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