The Home
Director: James DeMonaco
Writers: James DeMonaco, Adam Cantor
Cast: Pete Davidson, John Glover, Bruce Altman, Victor Williams
There's a lot to like, at least conceptually, about The Home, the latest horror film from The Purge creator James DeMonaco. It's got some solid gore effects, a strong cast, and a concept that plays on fears we've all dealt with in one form or another: What goes on behind closed doors at an elder care facility? These are all welcome ingredients, and at the very least the film manages to convey a certain eerie tone that anyone who's spent time in a place like the title location can understand and vibe with.
But concept and vibe are not always worthy substitutes for satisfying narrative, and when it comes to its story, this is a film that goes off the rails quickly and never gets back to the right track. For all its promise and its attempts to subvert what you might expect from such a film, The Home is, in the end, a series of interesting ideas in search of a good movie that we can only glimpse.
Pete Davidson stars as Max, a troubled young man whose entire adult life is marred by the unexpected passing of his older brother when he was a boy. Ever since losing his brother, with whom he was able to navigate the foster care system, Max has been in a near-constant rough patch. He's a talented artist, but he spends most of his time using that talent for massive graffiti projects, which then get him arrested. So, to avoid jail time, Max agrees to take a job at a retirement home in the middle of nowhere, where he'll work as a janitor and groundskeeper and hopefully turn his life around.
At first, everything seems to be going well. Max makes friends, including the home's retired theater director Lou (John Glover), and genuinely finds fulfillment in helping these kind, elderly residents find their way through life. The longer he stays, though, the more Max grows suspicious of some of the rules set up around the home, rules about the off-limits patients on the fourth floor, what's hiding in the basement, and what some residents warn him he should never see.
We're in promising territory here, especially when you consider Davidson's performance. His laid-back acting style lends him not just naturalism, but an air of relatability when he's trying his best to care for and be kind to these people who lead dramatically different lives than the one he's used to. It's a very lived-in piece of acting work, and it's a solid point-of-view from which to launch a story about a spooky nursing home where something sinister is going on behind the scenes. Plus, he's surrounded by a good ensemble, and everyone delivers with earnestness and conviction.
The problem comes when DeMonaco and co-writer Adam Cantor start to evolve the story into its eventual final form. This is, without giving anything away, one of those stories that wants to lead you to a dramatic twist in the third act that changes everything you thought you know about what's really going on, but its ability to guide viewers in its chosen direction is stunted by a surprising lack of overall vision.
Movies this twisty are, at their best, able to craft a sense of inevitable surprise along the way, seeding clues that will all line up perfectly in the end, and while The Home certainly does offer some clues and more than its fair share of red herrings, it never feels like something cohesive. It's a conspiracy thriller one minute, and the next maybe psychological horror, and the next it veers toward occult horror. Characters drop into the narrative solely to provide key information that may or may not be important to the final twist, and most importantly, the movie parses out its scares in such a way that they're either repetitive or simply spaced too far apart. The movie loses steam quickly, despite a 90-odd minute runtime, so when the turn finally does come it's too little, too late. If the entire film had been an exploration of what The Home does in its final 20 minutes, we might have really had something here. As it is, we've got a film that takes too long deciding what it should be, and despite the talent involved, it makes up its mind far too late to be satisfying.
The Home is in theaters July 25.
