Botany student Rylie (Malin Barr) and her waiter-cum-actor boyfriend Sam (Sawyer Spielberg, son of Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw) are travelling across New England, so she can research an outbreak of an ergot-like fungus called "sordico" that has been devastating local farms.
After their attempt to camp in a field is interrupted by the land owner in the middle of the night, they find their car won't start and so have to walk to the nearest property in the hopes of being able to call for assistance.
They turn up at the home of eccentric old farmer Karen (Barbara Kingsley), who lives in a rundown house with her brain-damaged son, Gunni (Jamie Bradley), who passes his time watching Popeye cartoons or staring at static on the TV.
Karen phones a neighbour to come over and help, but he never turns up and so the young couple are forced to share an awkward evening meal with Karen and Gunni, before the strange old lady shows them to a basement bedroom where they can pass the night.
Despite his medically-necessary dietary regime, Sam can't settle and so goes back upstairs to eat some more.
He is surprised by Gunni, who seems to be trying to tell him something, but then Sam passes out and has a Popeye-themed hallucination about his stomach condition.
Upon waking, he can't find Rylie - or Karen - and starts to search the house and its environs, but wandering into a barn he is ambushed and drugged.
Written and directed by Devereux Milburn, Honeydew is Texas Chain Saw Massacre family dynamics seen through a David Lynch or League of Gentlemen lens, with the extended sequence of Karen's hospitality to her guests being a marvellous, nerve-testing, exercise in the horror of the peculiar and uncomfortable.
Milburn clearly likes to push his audience as far as they can comfortably go, then push them a bit further.
No matter how bizarre the behaviour of the strange hostess - and her son - gets it feels so real and genuine, there is clearly something going on that the young guests aren't privy to.
While there is shock and gore in Honeydew, the best weapon in its arsenal is discomfort.
From the start, this atmosphere is accentuated by unusual sound design and experimental split screen, which could be construed as affectation, but if you allow yourself to be drawn into this nightmare, it can be genuinely unnerving.
Having taken a reasonably cliché set-up - and some very on-the-nose foreshadowing of the cause of the madness ahead - the writer/director puts a impressively disturbing spin on things.
Even when you think the action has moved into more familiar captivity tropes, matters continue to unfold in dark, weird, perverse, and unexpected ways.
For a moment, Devereux Milburn lulls you into thinking Honeydew might turn out to be standard Hollywood horror fare after all, but then he swiftly pulls the rug from under your feet.
But then the frights aren't over.
The bleak denouement seems to go on and on (but in a good way), and the more you dwell on what is happening before your eyes the more it'll get under your skin.
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