Writer-director James DeMonaco rebounds from the little-seen 2021 drama This Is the Night with the psychological thriller The Home, and it’s hard to tell if the earlier movie was a reward from longtime producer Jason Blum for DeMonaco’s many years of making installments of The Purge, or this one is a repayment to Blum for letting him make something that isn’t horror. Either way, the filmmaker’s latest not only exudes a constant air of unenthusiastic obligation, but underscores the growing realization that he’s better at coming up with concepts than fulfilling them with a cohesive story.
Starring Pete Davidson, The Home returns DeMonaco to the genre that earned him an artistic (and perhaps more importantly, commercial) pedigree, which may be enough to entice moviegoers to embark on another horrific journey with him. But a lackluster performance from Davidson fails to hold together an increasingly nonsensical plot, forcing the co-writer and director to increasingly rely upon misdirection and a rote sense of “weirdness” to make its anemic premise seem fully baked.
Davidson plays Max, a troubled not-so-young man who gets sentenced by a judge to community service at a retirement home after exercising his talent as a graffiti artist on the very public side of a building. Still haunted by the death of his foster brother decades earlier, he undertakes his new job with reluctant enthusiasm, but quickly bonds with the residents, in particular the luminous Norma (Mary Beth Peil) and the community’s self-appointed theater director Lou (John Glover). But in contrast to his growing comfort in his role as janitor and occasional caretaker, he begins experiencing painful, violent visions in his sleep that make him question the facility’s sunny façade.
Venturing into areas in the home that he was told were forbidden, Max starts to suspect that not all is as it seems, especially after one of the otherwise catatonic patients on the mysterious fourth floor attacks him unprompted. Torn between his affection for the residents, his desire to repair his relationship with his foster parents and the increasingly undeniable realization that something deeply wrong is going on, Max is forced to decide whether or not to investigate further, even it means risking his life.
Despite his additional participation here as an executive producer, it’s important to recognize that the role Davidson plays is not a reinvention of his public persona, even given the genre he’s working in. The actor is a skilled comedian and natural onscreen presence, but watching him at the beginning of the movie you can’t help but feel a bit like his foster parents must — really, acting like an aimless fuck up, again? Here, even with what in his standup material he’s described as a healthy amount of real life experience to lend authenticity to Max’s troubled past, he lacks the sophistication, and subtlety, to convincingly bring it to life on screen.
Admittedly, he’s hamstrung by a script (by DeMonaco and Adam Cantor) that indulges a central mystery without seeming especially concerned with whether or not its eventual resolution makes much sense. The first half of the film is heavily reliant on the notion that what senior citizens do is weird and creepy, from their hobbies and activities to the décor of their rooms. There’s then a shift where what might be going on in Max’s head is the focus — what are these nightmarish visions? — only for the results of his investigation of the facility to take a turn that’s too silly to take seriously, no matter how many needles get stuck into characters’ eyeballs (and it’s a lot).
That all of it eventually links back to Max’s complicated upbringing is genuinely sad, but it isn’t believable at all logically. Moreover the secret-society underpinnings that supposedly explain the reasons for everything feel like they’re injected more out of desperation than inspiration. It’s the kind of movie you want to talk about with your moviegoing companions after, but not for good reasons. (“Wait, so that thing led to the other?”)
The supporting cast DeMonaco assembles is admirable, including Glover, Piel, Bruce Altman as the facility’s resident physician, longtime character actor Ethan Phillips and Jessica Hecht as Sylvia, Max’s mother. But it serves neither them nor the film to provide motivations that are confusing and often contradictory, which further underscores that this film is not actually about anything — anything coherent, anyway. Is it meant to be a nightmarish funhouse? An exploration of grief and trauma? Or is it something to keep the filmmakers busy, regardless of its efficacy or impact?
Ultimately, The Home explains why DeMonaco has clung so tightly in his career to the Purge franchise that he created: there doesn’t seem to be anything else in that well of creativity for him to draw from. If that later proves untrue and he delivers another banger of a film or franchise I’ll be thrilled to say so, but until then he’d be advised to rely less on each smug idea he comes up with and work harder on their execution.
