What’s It About

The worst is yet to come, despite Joel’s belief that his troubles are finished after getting his mother in a care facility for dementia. It goes deeply into issues of love, friendship, and the fear that everyone has of losing themselves.

 MOVIESinMO REVIEW

Movies about scary old people should work better than this. The Home tries really hard to be creepy, but it fails, fails, fails in almost every way possible. Director James DeMonaco made some decent Purge movies before this, so what happened here? Pete Davidson plays Max, a guy who messes up his life after his brother kills himself. Now he has to work at a weird nursing home instead of going to jail. Sounds like it could be interesting, right? Wrong. Davidson looks bored the entire time, like he’d rather be anywhere else. His acting feels flat and empty, which makes it impossible to care about what happens to him. The nursing home looks creepy enough on the outside. There are strange old people doing weird things, mysterious floors you can’t visit, and doctors who obviously lie about everything. The movie keeps showing us gross stuff like needles going into eyeballs and people bleeding from strange places. But none of it feels scary – it just feels gross for no good reason. DeMonaco throws twist after twist at us, but none of them make sense. The story goes nowhere, nowhere, nowhere. We watch Max wander around the building, breaking rules because the script tells him to, not because it makes sense for his character. He finds secret rooms, meets mysterious people, and discovers terrible secrets, but everything feels random and pointless. The worst part is how slow everything moves. Scenes drag on forever without saying anything important. Characters talk and talk but never say anything that matters. The movie runs for almost two hours, but it feels like four. You’ll check your phone constantly, hoping it’s almost over. Mary Beth Peil and John Glover play some of the old people, and they’re actually pretty good actors. But the script gives them nothing real to work with. They have to act crazy and mysterious without any clear reason why. It’s sad watching talented people try to make this mess work. The movie pretends to be about deep things like getting older, being abandoned, and corrupt institutions. But it doesn’t actually explore any of these ideas. It just uses them as decoration to make the story seem more important than it really is. The themes are there on paper, but the movie never does anything with them. When the big reveal finally comes, it’s completely ridiculous. All the weird stuff we’ve been watching doesn’t connect to the ending at all. The plot twists don’t make the story better – they make it worse, worse, worse. Everything falls apart like a house of cards in a hurricane. Davidson’s performance is the biggest problem. He’s supposed to be this troubled guy dealing with trauma from his past, but he just looks confused and sleepy most of the time. When the movie needs him to show real emotion, he can’t deliver. The only convincing moments happen when he’s covered in fake blood and not talking at all. The visual style tries to be moody and atmospheric, but the lighting is so dark you can barely see what’s happening. The camera work feels lazy and uninspired. Even when scary things are supposed to be happening, everything looks boring and lifeless. The music tries to create tension by being really loud, but it just becomes annoying. DeMonaco seems to think that making things weird automatically makes them scary. He fills the screen with random disturbing images – old people in masks, bloody medical procedures, creepy dolls – but none of it means anything. It’s like he took a bunch of horror movie clichés and threw them together without understanding why they worked in other films. The supporting cast includes some veteran actors who deserve better material. Bruce Altman plays the obviously evil doctor, but he doesn’t even try to hide that he’s the bad guy. Jessica Hecht shows up as Max’s foster mother, but her scenes feel disconnected from the main story. Everyone seems to know they’re in a bad movie and they’re just trying to get through it. By the time the violent ending arrives, you won’t care who lives or dies. The gore feels excessive and pointless, like DeMonaco is trying to shock us into thinking the movie is more exciting than it actually is. But violence without meaning is just noise, and this movie makes a lot of noise without saying anything important. The Home wants to be a psychological thriller that messes with your head, but it’s actually just a boring movie that wastes your time. It’s the kind of film that makes you appreciate good horror movies even more. When you see how badly this genre can be handled, you realize how hard it is to do it right. DeMonaco clearly has some talent – his Purge movies proved that. But this feels like he ran out of ideas and just threw together whatever seemed scary. The result is a movie that thinks it’s smarter than it actually is, and that’s always annoying to watch. Save your money and watch something else. There are plenty of good horror movies out there that actually understand how to build tension, develop characters, and tell coherent stories. The Home does none of these things well. It’s a waste of time, talent, and whatever budget they spent making it. This movie fails because it doesn’t respect its audience. It thinks we’ll be satisfied with random weird images and lazy storytelling. We deserve better than this confused, boring mess. The Home should have stayed closed.

OUR RATING – AN INSTITUTIONALIZED 2

MEDIA

• Genre – Horror
• Street date
• Digital – August 26, 2025
• DVD – September 23, 2025
• Video – 1080p
• Screen size – 2.39:1
• Sound – English: Dolby Atmos, English: Dolby TrueHD 7.1, Audio descriptive
• Subtitles – English SDH, Spanish, French

Extras

• Audio Commentary by director James DeMonaco and producer Sebastien K. Lemercier
• Seeing is Believing – Making The Home Featurette
• Theatrical Trailer