Honeyjoon Film Review: Growth Through Grief

Honeyjoon, Lilian T. Mehrel’s debut feature, delicately analyzes a mother-daughter relationship as they tread grief’s ever-changing waves.

Honeyjoon opens in the idyllic Azores Islands on a rare reunion for mother and daughter, Lela (Amira Casar, of Call Me By Your Name) and June (Ayden Mayeri, of Jackpot!). Lela and June are in the Azores Islands on the anniversary of the death of Lela’s husband and June’s father. The trip is an homage to a trip he took many years ago after his own father’s passing, from which he would always tell Lela and June stories about. 

The two women have been processing this loss in very different ways. Lela has been open about the monstrous waves of grief she’s been experiencing, but June is much more reserved in showing how her father’s death has impacted her. While Lela wants to use this trip to connect with June in their shared loss, June is committed to deflecting through easy jokes with a desire to make it through this trip as peacefully as possible. 

When the two women go on a private tour of the island, led by the observant and handsome João (José Condessa, of Strange Way of Life), the presence of a third party illuminates their contrasting approaches to grief, but parallel their desire to figure out who they are after this loss. As the women explore, they find unexpected pleasures in the small moments and begin to pick up the pieces of themselves that had been shattered over the past year. 

Mehrel has an extraordinarily artful approach to telling the story of June and Lela’s journey. Cinematographer Inés Gowland does an exceptional job of making the Azores Islands its own character within the story, almost as a stand-in for the man these women lost that had kept them together all their lives, despite their differences. The trip they are on is so rooted in him; it makes sense traveling there to relive a trip that meant so much to him and his healing journey after loss would make them feel especially close to him at this point in their grieving process. 

While Honeyjoon has flashes of greatness, it is held back by an overly ambitious plot that does not give the story enough time to develop all the concepts it aims to explore. Part of the major focus on the film, big enough to influence its title, is that this is a place most people visit on honeymoons rather than grief anniversaries. The wildly different motivation for June and Lela’s trip to the Azores Islands is positioned in a dark, yet funny juxtaposition to the motivations of others visiting the islands, but after the first 15 minutes of the film, this plot point is dropped completely, and the exploration of this contrast is never acknowledged again.

Similarly, the film repeatedly attempts to take on comedic undertones, but the script is unable to support these jokes with enough structure to make Honeyjoon feel like a true dark comedy. While it’s positioned that perhaps June uses humor to escape facing her feelings, we never truly see her character fleshed out enough to understand if that is her genuine motivation behind not taking this trip and her mother very seriously. 

This, however, seems to be the central issue with Honeymoon. The film repeatedly makes references to the waves of grief and the ever-changing nature of mourning a loved one, but at a certain point in the film, these analogies grow repetitive as they never evolve further. Conceptually, these themes of identity, loss and growth are explored but only at a very surface level. While Mehrel’s film is visually striking and earnest in its attempt to unpack grief, it fails to make the splash it aims to.

Honeyjoon will open at the IFC Center in New York on June 10, 2026 and in Los Angeles and Chicago on June 19.