Review: The Home

Director:  James DeMonaco

Stars:  Pete Davidson, Mary Beth Peil, John Glover

Having spent the better part of a decade serving up various arrangements of his high-concept Purge franchise (five movies and a series!), James DeMonaco spent his last two features reminiscing about Staten Island. Here he changes tack again, embracing the hagsploitation horror subgenre that’s recently proven so serviceable for the likes of Ti West, Zach Cregger and Coralie Fargeat. Hell, throwing an inexplicably naked old person into the mix has even become a trope of so-called ‘A24 horror’ soon to be lambasted in Scary Movie 6. America remains deeply unsettled by the concept of aging, and now it’s DeMonaco’s turn to investigate why.

Pete Davidson stars as socially conscious graffiti artist Max, a late-twenties burnout who finds himself ‘held accountable’ for his vandalism with community service at Green Meadows retirement home. While given a skeleton key on his arrival, Max is expressly told to stay off of the fourth floor. The residents and relatively friendly staff do their best to make him feel welcome, but the kooky incidents pile on just as enthusiastically. Geriatrics rut with abandon (eww! old people sex!), gnarled cries echo down corridors and one woman starts inexplicably bleeding from the cranium during aqua aerobics.

DeMonaco’s weird mask kink continues apace and, just as The Purge movies often seemed disturbed by the idea of group-think, so The Home often tries to unsettle by implying a conspiratorial element between the residents and staff. This manifests subtly (a bit of sinister painting in the art room) and… not-so-subtly (all of the rest). And of course there’s the implication of an abusive and powerful regime behind all of these horrors. At least his is a healthy and timely mistrust of institutions given America’s present climate.

In the early stretches DeMonaco is clearly aiming for the gaslighting paranoia of Polanski circa Rosemary’s Baby or The Tenant. But he lacks some of the discipline involved in making such psychological torments tick. He’s over-busy, distracted by the potentia of creepypasta website curiosities (that admittedly add colour to The Home‘s hoary old ‘Google the plot’ scene) and the like.

The casting of Davidson in the lead raised a questioning eyebrow considering his abrasiveness in the likes of Bodies Bodies Bodies, but he’s relatively likeable here, dialling down some of that nasal intensity… or storing it up for the end. Without that edge, however, his Max is a little bland, putting the actor in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t conundrum. Hung up on his brother’s death many years earlier, Max tries to connect with old dame Norma (Mary Beth Peil), and it’s via her warnings that he comes to feel validated in his misgivings about Green Meadows.

Indeed, while the locale is relatively restrained compared to the street warzones of The Purge, DeMonaco manages to make the supposedly tranquil corridors of Green Meadows an almost constant racket. His in-your-face attitude has lost none of its immediacy.

The Home could have been quite a staid, non-event. One suspects that a more sombre approach would have rendered it a mumblesome, self-serious chore. DeMonaco’s approach probably pushes too far in the other direction, however. Like an episode of American Horror Story, the sense of hyperactivity renders many of his vivid images meaningless. Compacting so much together deletes the power of any one ‘scare’. The Home is more of an agitated funhouse. A collage of freakishness.

There’s some imagination to it, though. In looking to visualise what’s not in plain sight DeMonaco goes through everything from UV to infrared thermography. The Home is busy with lurid textures. But the increasing spectre of Jordan Peele in the third act rather dilutes the sense of originality that this canny idea could have presented. DeMonaco ultimately perceives that it’s the elder generations leeching from the younger ones that keeps them sinister. An expression, perhaps, of the resentments felt toward the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, and the sense that the future’s already been mortgaged.

Come the end, the over-the-top ultraviolence reaches a pitch of such hysteria that there’s really no taking any of it seriously. Attune yourself to DeMonaco’s maximalist register and this is some rather messy, anarchic fun, lacking in atmosphere but packed full of japery and pushing far beyond its means. DeMonaco’s revolution is a remorselessly brutal one; a blood-soaked do-or-die massacre that takes no prisoners, just like his continuing brand of vulgar auteurism. As subtle as a fallen roof to the face.