Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s murderous Pooh offers a little effective gore and almost no suspense. The masks briefly disturb, but thin characters and sluggish cutting turn a provocative idea into an exhausting slasher.
Rhys Frake-Waterfield writes and directs Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey as a straight-faced slasher, a decision that would be defensible if the slashing generated much suspense. It does not, and the film is dull enough to make its 84 minutes feel like an unreasonable request. There is nothing inherently wrong with turning a childhood companion into a monster; we can imagine a nasty little horror film about the fear of being abandoned. This one mostly wants to put familiar animal faces on killers.
The grievance belongs to Winnie the Pooh and Piglet, abandoned by Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon), but the screenplay spends much of its attention on young women who did not cause it. Maria (Maria Taylor), Jessica (Natasha Rose Mills) and Alice (Amber Doig-Thorne) need enough individual life for their danger to matter. They get too little. The performers are left trying to make distress do the work that characterisation should have done, and we cannot blame them for failing to manage it.
The creature masks offer the film’s one useful visual idea. Their fixed expressions briefly unsettled us, because they give the violence no readable emotion and leave us staring at faces that cannot respond. Winnie the Pooh is played by Craig David Dowsett and Piglet by Chris Cordell, but both performers face the same restriction: the masks allow them almost no expression. Kept in view, they soon look like awkward costumes, and the threat wears off.
Vince Knight’s cinematography does not compensate. The murky images make the danger difficult to read, without making the darkness itself frightening. A slasher needs us to understand enough of the space to fear what might enter it; too often we are simply trying to make out what is there. The production design gives us little to linger over, either, so there is scant pleasure in looking even when the action pauses.
The editing, credited to Rhys Frake-Waterfield and Scott Chambers, compounds the problem by letting an already slight idea drag. Repetition can be useful in horror, but the attacks need changes of pace, emphasis or expectation, and these offer too few. Andrew Scott Bell’s music cannot supply the missing suspense on its own; we keep noticing how little there is to anticipate between bouts of violence. We were bored, then irritated, because the film spends so much longer hurting its women than giving us reasons to care about them.
There is some competent practical gore, and the screams have an unpleasant conviction that more polished horror can lack. Those are limited virtues, but they show that somebody has considered how an injury should look and sound. What is missing is anything to look forward to beyond the next injury: an unexpected image, a sharp joke or a character whose survival matters. The film’s determination to remain humourless makes its lack of such pleasures harder to ignore.
Most critics have rejected it, and we agree: the problem is not that the idea is in poor taste, but that so little has been done with it. Even an audience arriving solely for the gore deserves a film that can sustain interest between attacks. Anyone tempted by the title can safely leave it at that.
