Honeymoonish (2024)
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 Honeymoonish has your answer. And spoiler: the answer is not as interesting as you'd hope.
Going in, I was genuinely optimistic. A romcom rooted in Kuwaiti culture felt like a promising proposition. Either it would bring a fresh perspective to a genre desperately in need of one, or it would at least subvert the tired tropes enough to keep things lively. What I got instead was essentially a Hallmark movie with a different postcode. It shares the exact same DNA as those glossy "love in a random location" productions, the kind with titles like Lost in Paradise or Love in Aruba, complete with a cutesy soundtrack and a plot so ludicrous it practically demands you turn your brain off at the door. I've actually sat through The Barbados Project (2022), which lives in very similar territory, and even that had a few moments to redeem it. Honeymoonish never quite finds its equivalent.
The narrative reaches a level of absurdity I genuinely didn't think was possible in modern cinema, particularly during a baffling mid-film revelation that I'm still processing. We hit a point where two older women suddenly realise the two leads might actually be related. Not by blood, before you panic. 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 family. I spent a good twenty minutes just staring at the screen, trying to work out how a screenwriter looked at that concept and thought, yes, this is the perfect third-act obstacle for a lighthearted comedy. It's a genuinely bizarre creative choice, and not in a charming, eccentric way. In a way that derails whatever fragile momentum the film had managed to scrape together.
Strip away that bewildering detour and the actual filmmaking is a bit of a mess regardless. The acting, to put it generously, is terrible across the board. The leads deliver their lines with all the emotional conviction of a sat-nav announcing a roundabout. They completely fail to sell the manufactured romance or the manufactured panic of their situation, and when the performances aren't there, a film like this has nowhere to hide. El Semaan wraps the whole thing in a brightly lit, aggressively cheerful package, but no amount of bouncy incidental music can mask the fact that the characters are entirely hollow. It's a glossy surface with nothing of substance underneath, and the sheen wears off fast.
What makes it genuinely frustrating rather than just forgettable is that there was something worth exploring here. The cultural setting, the specific social dynamics, even that strange breastfeeding plot point, buried in there somewhere is a more interesting film that was never made. A film willing to engage seriously with its own context might have amounted to something. I think of something like Capernaum (2018), which showed just how powerfully Middle Eastern cinema can connect when it commits to its material. Honeymoonish does the opposite. It borrows the Western romcom template wholesale and just changes the scenery.
The genre can absolutely work as comfort viewing. I'm not above a good guilty pleasure. But Honeymoonish doesn't even pull that off. It's not charmingly bad. It's not so-bad-it's-good. It's just a below-average romantic comedy that actively resists being entertaining on even the most basic level, and that, more than anything else, is the real disappointment.
Two stars.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2026-07-20
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US
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