Honeymoonish (2024)
Arab cinema covers an enormous range of tones and registers, from the unflinching social realism of Capernaum (2018) to lighter, crowd-pleasing fare aimed squarely at regional multiplex audiences. Honeymoonish (2024) plants itself firmly in the latter camp: a Kuwait-Lebanon co-production that pitches itself as a breezy opposites-attract romcom, following a pair of newlyweds who quickly realise their honeymoon is going to be considerably more turbulent than the brochure suggested. It is exactly the kind of film that gets made when a studio wants a safe, commercially minded product for a long weekend release slot, and there is nothing wrong with that ambition in principle. The Gulf region has been developing its own homegrown popular cinema at a fair clip over the past decade, and romantic comedies are as reliable a genre vehicle as any for testing whether local audiences will turn up for locally made entertainment rather than imported Hollywood product.
The film is directed by Elie El Semaan, a Lebanese filmmaker who has worked across television and commercial production in the Arab world. El Semaan is not, it should be said, coming at this from a background in gritty or auteur-driven work; his sensibility sits closer to polished television than to anything you might associate with the more celebrated strand of Lebanese cinema, the kind that surfaces at international festivals (and that we have covered elsewhere on this blog, including All That's Left of You (2025)). Honeymoonish is produced by Eagle Films Arabia alongside the Beirut-based Eagle Films, a distributor and producer with a long track record of bringing mainstream Arabic-language features to Gulf and Levantine cinemas. The budget has not been officially disclosed, though the finished film has the look of a modestly funded production that spent what money it had on bright locations and a cheerful score rather than anything more ambitious. The source material is original rather than adapted, which leaves the screenplay carrying the full weight of whatever the film does or does not achieve.
The cast is led by Nour Al-Ghandour, a Jordanian actress with a considerable following built largely through popular Arab television dramas, and Mahmoud Boushahri, a Kuwaiti actor similarly well known to regional TV audiences. They are joined by Ascia Al-Shammiri, a Kuwaiti social media personality turned actress whose casting signals that the film is at least partly targeting a younger, digitally connected demographic. Mehdi Perwez and Qahtan Al-Qahtani round out the principal ensemble in supporting roles. On paper, the pairing of Al-Ghandour and Boushahri makes commercial sense: both bring pre-existing audience affection from their television work, which is precisely the kind of built-in goodwill a romcom of this type relies on to paper over any gaps in the writing. Whether that goodwill translates to screen chemistry is, of course, a different matter entirely, and the sort of question that only the film itself can answer. It is worth noting that romcoms built around this particular dynamic, the mismatched couple thrown together and forced to discover common ground, have a notoriously thin margin between charming and insufferable, as we have touched on in our look at The Golden Spurtle (2025) and the cheerfully chaotic The Barbados Project (2022).
If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you take the saccharine, paint-by-numbers formula of a daytime television romance and transplant it to the Middle East, Elie El Semaan’s 2024 romcom Honeymoonish has your answer.
Going in, I was hoping for a fresh cultural perspective or at least a cracking subversion of the genre's tired tropes. Instead, I found myself watching what is essentially a Hallmark movie made in Kuwait. It shares the exact same DNA as glossy, love in random places like Lost in Paradise or Love in Aruba, offering up a cutesy soundtrack and a plot so ludicrous it practically demands you turn your brain off at the door.
The narrative reaches a level of absurdity that I genuinely didn't think was possible in modern cinema, particularly during a baffling mid-film revelation. We hit a point where two older women suddenly realise the two main characters might actually be siblings. Now, before you panic, it’s not by blood. Apparently, in a twist of local cultural lore, the Mother of the Groom-to-be might have breastfed the Bride-to-be more than five times, which legally and spiritually makes them related. Honestly, I spent the next twenty minutes just staring at the screen, trying to process how a screenwriter looked at that concept and thought, "Yes, this is the perfect third-act obstacle for a lighthearted comedy."
When you strip away that bewildering cultural detour, the actual filmmaking is a bit of a mess. The acting across the board is, to put it politely, terrible. The leads deliver their lines with all the emotional resonance of a microwave beep, completely failing to sell the manufactured romance or the manufactured panic of their predicament. El Semaan wraps the whole thing in a brightly lit, aggressively cheerful romcom package, but no amount of upbeat, cutesy music can mask the fact that the characters are entirely hollow. It’s a glossy surface with absolutely nothing of substance underneath.
I struggled to find a single standout quality in the entire runtime. It’s not just that the film is a below-average romantic comedy; it’s that it actively resists being entertaining, even on the most basic, guilt-pleasure level.
Honeymoonish arrives at an interesting moment for Gulf cinema, when there is genuine appetite from both audiences and studios for Arabic-language comedies that do not need to borrow their template wholesale from Hollywood. The frustration here is not that someone tried to make a light, funny romantic film set in Kuwait and Lebanon; it is that the execution is so formulaic and inert that it fails even on its own modest terms. A romcom that cannot generate warmth, laughs, or any real investment in its central couple is not a genre entry so much as a genre outline. There is an audience out there for feel-good Arab popular cinema, and it deserves rather better than this.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2026-07-20
Where to watch
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