Tom (Jim Schubin) and Eve (Chloe Carroll) get a wild hair up their asses that they can put one over on the eggheads runnin’ your friendly neighborhood research project and score fifty grand in cold, hard cash. All they need to do is convince everyone they are married, and get locked up good n’ tight in a futuristic smart house cum lab for a month (while wearing fancy futuristic suits as a bonus) while the scientists wrap their noggins around why couples stop being all lovey-dovey. What could go wrong?
Fuckin’ plenty, because as Tom really seems to be gettin’ his jollies in his new environs, Eve begins to suspect that Tom is a tad different from the man she thought she knew… as she tries to navigate a slippery-slope that leads into madness!
In The Honeymoon Phase; the debut feature from writer/director Phillip G. Carroll Jr., we get a near-perfect slice of sweet, sweet Twilight Zone pie, as our seemingly normal couple get their reality turned upside-down and sideways thanks to the unholy machinations of a mysterious scientific cabal hell-bent on fucking with our protagonists… with all of the surreal and sinister results you can imagine in this scenario.
Heaps of praise should also be placed upon this production for the effective use of one major location, as the swanky house mentioned up yonder becomes a character unto itself… a seductively sinister avatar for the breaking point of every couple, amped up to eleven!
Of course the crux of buying into this scenario lies in the performance of it’s leads… and Chloe Carroll’s (a talented filmmaker in her own right who’s work we’ve covered here and here) Eve makes for a believable heroine who makes a journey from faux-marital bliss to full-on terror, and her interactions and chemistry with Schubin are convincing no matter if they are lovers or adversaries!
To sum it all up; The Honeymoon Phase is a highly-effective sci-fi thriller that puts relationship tropes under the microscope while giving us plenty of off-kilter thrills that make relationships a bit more surreal in the process!
