Directed By James DeMonaco

Starring – Pete Davidson, John Glover, Bruce Altman

The Plot – Max (Davidson), a troubled man, starts working at a retirement home and realizes its residents and caretakers harbor sinister secrets. As he investigates the building and its forbidden fourth floor, he starts to uncover connections to his own past and upbringing as a foster child

Rated R for strong bloody violence and gore, adult language and some sexual content.

The Home (2025) Official Trailer – Pete Davidson

POSITIVES

In being as ambiguously optimistic as I can be, the movie is certainly both unpredictable and unforgettable, and that’s due mostly to the unfiltered range of the direction from “The Purge’s” own James DeMonaco, which seems driven by the will to purely make audiences feel as uncomfortable as possible. Not only does James revel in the lewdness and disgusting conditions of nursing homes, with unsupervised eyes often enacting a dangerous environment that naturally comes across as creepy, but he also paints the engagement with an air of ambiguity that is pushed by an unraveling mystery within the screenplay that he helped co-write, the likes of which you will have absolutely no idea where it’s going, because the movie itself feels like the sum of two compromising halves that starts as a psychological thriller before contorting itself into an action film of sorts, by film’s end. Aside from this, the only other kind thing that I have to say about this movie is the supporting cast of familiar faces do a remarkable job emulating some character into their respective roles, helping to take some of the burden off of Davison’s tragic miscasting. The best of these is easily John Glover or “Dawson’s Creek’s” Mary-Beth Peil, with the former articulating mental frailty turned to madness, and the latter surmising sweet sensibilities to a caring hand that Max frequently confides in, cementing a charming dynamic between the two that made up in chemistry what it lacked in long-form focus.

NEGATIVES

Once in a while, a film comes along that is so awfully morbid that it can’t be put into words, and with “The Home” seemingly being this year’s recipient, we have the kind of misguided ambition in nearly every form of the movie’s production that keeps this from ever attaining the kinds of palpable thrills or even underlining tension to hook its audience to the plight of its characters. From the opening shot of the movie, there’s an erratic essence to DeMonaco’s direction that made me feel like I was having a stroke while watching it, both with abrasive editing techniques that jarringly intrude upon heavy-handed conversations between characters, but also meticulous camera placements that focus on the most random of details while you’re attempting to pay attention to what is transpiring in the foreground of the narrative. The freneticism of the movie’s cinematography does help paint an uneasiness to the environment that we spend almost the entirety of our story within, but it’s told compromisingly in ways that withhold momentum from the depths of the storytelling, creating this grindingly dragging form of pacing that somehow made a 92-minute movie feel like two-and-a-half hours, and I’m not even embellishing in the slightest. On top of this, the movie maxes out this intention within four different dream sequences that become tediously predictable after the first one, and intentionally padded to the runtime after the second. It’s easy to interpret that the movie is trying to convey Max’s difficulty with sleeping after an untimely death in his family, but this intention continuously beats us over the head with a lack of subtlety so thick it might as well be showcased during a music video, and it just makes the lack of legitimate thrills for the movie all the more apparent when it has to utilize fantasy to bring forth anything deviating from the monotony of the everyday world captured boringly in the film. Aside from the revolting presentation, the film has a thirst for gross-out imagery that not only involves elderly characters in their most vulnerable of positions, but also some solid practical effects work involving gore that the movie shamelessly wastes on revolting gags that ultimately go nowhere once you realize where the story is headed. Whether fictional or not, it’s always been difficult for me to take entertainment value in watching the elderly suffer, and there’s a real tastelessness to what’s transpiring in a movie that has no qualms about sacrificing a single one of them, a fact made worse by spending so much time alongside Pete Davidson, who couldn’t be worse for the role that he’s asked to undertake. Full transparency, I have no issues with Davidson as a comedian. In fact, I actually find him legitimately funny in small doses, however he has no emotionality what so ever when it comes to articulating the magnitude of what’s transpiring under this retirement home full of secrets, with continuous wooden deliveries so void of energy or investment that it sacrifices the empathetic value to his character’s isolated predicament, cementing not only an unconvincing personality for the audience to regretfully follow, but also a failed effort to break out of the one-dimensional box that Hollywood has locked Davidson in, and thrown away the key, entailing what is easily one of the year’s worst and deconstructive lead performances. Davidson is given no help in the script department, as the dialogue in the movie unfairly gives him these astute observations that echo everything that the audience sees in the visuals of the very same scene, painting a try-hard emphasis to his exposition that goes directly out of its way to paint emphasis in moments that don’t require them. If the dialogue was this transparent during the creative and tonal shifts of such an infamously memorable third act, then it could’ve been appreciated in steering the ship through convoluted waters in the movie’s development, but it essentially only persists during the movie’s much more sedated opening half, crafting these tediously taxing conversations between characters that don’t feel interesting for even a moment to lure me in enticingly. Finally, I wanted to save the third act for last because it involves an evolution so ridiculous that it finally forces DeMonaco to abandon taking his film as seriously as he was for the previous 70% of the engagement, both with audaciously unearned social commentary in the motive of the movie’s antagonist, as well as exploitatively indulgent violence that feels lifted from a Jason Statham movie. On the former, the film’s attempts to be smarter than it actually is results in an underlining motive that is preheated by some obviously on-the-nose news bulletins that continuously intrude upon any scene that takes place around a television set, and the latter, while a lot of fun with a climax that flies off of the rails quickly with the kind of gratuitous bloodshed and gore towards becoming an entirely different movie all together, enacts something that was undeniably memorable, even if for the worst kind of reasons imaginable. During this time, my audience filled with the kind of unmitigated laughter that seems to be geared towards the film, instead of alongside with it, and while DeMonaco might’ve been primed by the desire to make something the buzz of the Tik Tok community, he instead orchestrates a ground-shaking resolution that is abruptly enacted with essentially supernatural ridiculousness of the “Final Destination” variety out of nowhere, such as a roof flying off of the home and killing two people, cementing the unavoidable urge for the audience to yell aloud “What the fuck was that?”, once the camera fades to black for credits scroll.

OVERALL
“The Home” collapses under the weight of an artificial foundation, thanks to convolutedly complicated plot turns, unintentionally humorous tonal enveloping, and a flatlining performance from Pete Davidson so wooden that it keeps the emotionality of the story flatlined through some of the toughest 92 minutes of film that you will experience this year. While there’s admiration in James DeMonaco’s uncompromising vision to craft something memorable, even in the most unintentional direction, the film is a creative and tonal mess that exists somewhere between disgusting and exploitative, proving that home isn’t always where the heart is.

My Grade: 1.4 or F