The quiet life of a boy and his family is endangered when his father does not return home from his work collecting honey in the forest.
Replete with the artistic style of recent Middle Eastern art house cinema but lacking the substance to truly engage the viewer.
For all its pleasures, it covers terrain already heavily mined by other arthouse filmmakers.
Kaplanoglu’s Turkish drama won the Golden Bear at Berlin last year, as much for its stunning photography as what the piece had to say about a fast disappearing lifestyle.
Sometimes academic, sometimes beautiful.
The film itself has a weightlessness, suspended between one exquisitely-lit shot and the next. It’s lovely, and lacking something — a spark of oddity, maybe.
It is a film whose unhurried pace must be allowed to grow on you, but once it has, there is something engrossing about the tragedy unfurling slowly and indirectly before our eyes. Some of the images Kaplanoglu finds are superb: a forest, a mountainside, a rippling, pulsing moon reflected in a pool of water. It is poetic film-making.
Honey pays homage to the grace and mystery of nature, but it will linger as one of the great modern films about childhood.
Beautiful images and a poetic sense of yearing are the virtues of this delicate tale.
It's a film in which each shot has been meticulously composed and yet remains strangely lifeless.
Beautiful, contemplative, carefully composed.
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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