The Home opens in theaters Friday, July 25.
From Danny McBride writing Halloween sequels to Chris Rock starring in a Saw movie and Jordan Peele’s entire career shift, recent years have found a lot of famous funnymen prove they can also do horror with the best of them. As the latest comedian to jump into that world, Saturday Night Live veteran Pete Davidson does decent work in The Home, playing things straight and doing his best to make his character Max feel relatable, but it’s an uphill battle he can’t win in a movie that is as flimsy and inadvertently silly as this one.
The story focuses on Max, who we know is Very Troubled because he wakes up in a drug den and then goes and tags a building with graffiti that reads “Our future is burning” as his red spray paint splatters back on his face, evoking blood. It’s subtle, but you might get the idea this guy is in a bad place in his life! And that sort of clumsy and awkward storytelling unfortunately is par for the course here.
One thing leads to another and Max ends up being given a community-service sentence to work a temporary job as an orderly at a retirement home, where he discovers some very strange and disturbing goings-on. Yes, it’s a time-honored horror movie tradition to leave us to ponder why characters don’t just leave when things get weird and dangerous, but The Home is especially egregious in this regard. Without any sort of genuine, slow build-up to let us believe Max might first feel some connections to this place, it’s preposterous that he doesn’t bail on his very first day after discovering two of the elderly residents having sex wearing bizarre masks, and then witnessing a woman suddenly begin to bleed from the head while doing pool exercises. His legal issues don’t hold up as a credible reason for him to stick around or to not at least contact someone about the hugely troubling signs that something is very off, and yet Max initially seems more curious or bothered than properly freaked out by the rapidly escalating strangeness.
Co-writer/director James DeMonaco is best known for The Purge series, and while those films are certainly inconsistent, there is a lot to enjoy in them and the heightened world DeMonaco created. The Home, though, seems like it’s trying to at least begin in a more grounded, realistic setting, but feels incredibly and often laughably heavy-handed from the start.
To its credit, there is some mildly interesting mystery to be found as Max begins to do some investigating into what’s going on in this place, especially in regards to the fourth floor and what he’s been warned are especially troubled occupants. Yet Max’s reactions continually don’t read true, and would-be scary scenes often play as more goofy as a result. When Max inevitably ventures onto a forbidden floor and a snarling, out-of-control old man lunges at him, his response is to say “I’m not gonna hurt you,” rather than, you know, getting the hell away from this guy.
DeMonaco is going for some messaging here, but it’s muddled and hard to decipher until near the end, where parallels to real life discussions and debates about different generations and who’s in control are made blatant. It feels like too little, too late as far as resonating or helping The Home to hit home, even if there is some last-minute amusement to be had with how things suddenly get a lot more direct and pointed. The final sequence does at least allow for some over-the-top visceral confrontations that feel like DeMonaco veering back into The Purge terrain, where he’s much more in his element. (Also, while most of the gore isn’t done with much panache, if you’re sensitive to harm being done to eyeballs, this movie might elicit a reaction.)
Prior to that, though, The Home pays lip service to how the elderly can often be discarded or overlooked, while mostly leaning into a lot of easy and tired, “Aren’t these old people so creepy?” imagery. It doesn’t help that some of the scenes here are very similar to 2022’s X, including Max seeing an old woman hauntingly staring out a window at him or a sequence where one of the residents crawls into bed with him while he sleeps. But unlike Ti West’s film, where the elderly Pearl was an evocative character given enough nuance to allow us to understand the twisted pain and jealousy that guided her, here it all feels surface level and hollow.
The supporting cast is at least filled with a pretty impressive, recognizable group of, “Hey, it’s that guy/gal!” veteran character actors as the retirement home’s staff and residents, including John Glover, Bruce Altman, Ethan Phillips, and Mary Beth Peil. Their presence at least keeps The Home a bit more engaging than it might otherwise be, particularly Glover, who looks to be having a lot of fun as an eccentric acting class teacher. But with such a weak story at the center, all the support in the world can’t hold this up as a horror movie worth watching.
