Critic Reviews

Honeyglue has a very good movie inside it, but decisions brought on by inexperience prevent it from sprouting its wings.

Jessica Tuck gives an emotionally raw performance as Morgan’s mother, and Amanda Plummer’s turn as a trailer park resident sheds more light on Jordan than all the other scenes combined.

Writer-director James Bird took inspiration from real-life experiences, and the story is obviously heartfelt. But despite a stylized, edgy surface, Honeyglue doesn’t stray from the well-worn weepy narrative.

It’s Honeyglue, a romantic drama, which fittingly, given that title, is sticky with sentimentality.

Writer-director James Bird’s second feature tells an entirely familiar story with a dash of transvestism thrown in, but doesn’t do anything interesting with that twist – and the lumpen screenplay is drag enough.

It's more interested in borrowing terminal cancer as a narrative shorthand for intensity than investigating it as a lived experience.

[An] unintentionally hilarious tragic romance.

Throughout, Bird’s visuals are consistently flat, and his habit of cinematographically spinning around his characters (at a dinner table, on a dance floor, in a field) is dizzying in an unpleasant, nausea-inducing way — thus creating a fitting marriage of form and content.