After arguably seeing his fame peak in the early days of Covid — on the back of starring turns in Big Time Adolescence and The King of Staten Island, a short-lived but tabloid-saturating romance with Ariana Grande, and the rise of his perennial bromance-of-the-year relationship with Machine Gun Kelly — Pete Davidson has settled into a less A-list lane of late. This has mostly consisted of piling up cameos in blockbuster franchises (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Fast X), voicework (Marmaduke, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Dog Man), a disappointing pseudo-autofictional detour back to TV (Bupkis), and an array of B-tier properties (Dito Montiel’s Riff Raff, Tim Story’s upcoming The Pickup). His latest project to hit theaters, The Home, lands squarely amidst that last grouping, and to add to the implied ephemerality of that category, the film quickly asserts itself as a product seemingly from another era — and not just because Davidson’s slacker degenerate Max is immediately arrested for… graffitiing. More so, The Home develops its eerie core after said street art lands Max in a diversionary program, in the form of a four-month stint as super at a retirement home where he soon suspects sinister goings-on. The old folks are not alright.
Director James DeMonaco (of the first three Purge films fame) and co-writer Adam Cantor don’t waste any time in unsettling their unsuspecting dupe. On day one, Max witnesses a water aerobics class end with a poolful of white-haired retirees scattering while a lone resident clutches her head in horror as red rivers leak from her hairline and bathe her face in blood. Likewise ominous is the stern warning he receives during training not to venture onto the fourth floor, where he’s told there are residents suffering from various, more severe conditions; of course, being the rule-agnostic malingerer that he is, Max quickly breaks this directive when he hears a scream, only to find what looks like a ward full of wheelchair-bound cryptkeepers mumbling incoherently and dripping blood from their eyes. One such sufferer, upon seeing Max, becomes uncontrollably agitated and quickly pounces on him, before staff pull him off. This is plenty enough to fully stoke Max’s developing paranoia, and he subsequently leverages his growing insomnia in service of some late-night sleuthing. But before he discovers much, Norma (Mary Beth Peil), a resident with whom he has quickly bonded, offers him a chilling warning about something being seriously wrong with the place. The next day, she seemingly unalives herself by jumping from an upper floor and landing in perfect alignment to impale upon the spikes of a wrought-iron fence.
To go too much more into the plot might give the game away, but notable is that, up until this point, The Home plays like a particularly low-rent version of the psycho-occult horror flick so en vogue in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Where modern iterations of this subgenre typically skew toward either sanitized studio fare or an arthouse sheen — and that’s even when they’re avoiding any metaphor-driven throughline — DeMonaco’s film is gleefully trashy and underbaked. Davidson, whether via character choice or simply reflective of the level of commitment he’s bringing to the project, seems to be sleepwalking through the whole thing, delivering clunky, plot-advancing lines as if reading them from an SNL cue card; in fact, if there were any jokes here, The Home might play like a sketch skewering this type of film, as everything that happens feels like a post-bong rip, pre-nap attempt at scribbling notes about Next of Kin onto a napkin. Max also sets up a security center of sorts in his bedroom, where he monitors cameras he has hidden cleverly throughout the home… like sitting out in the open on top of a cabinet. And his conspiracy-hunting comes to a head when a hacker reaches out to him on his computer via a GeoCities-looking website where she — her face digitally deformed — tells him that her father is on the fourth floor and Max has to keep going with his amateur investigation: he is the only hope of helping these people.
The Home’s essential inflection point comes none too long before its end credits, and it’s likely that a majority swath of viewers will have already filed the film somewhere between disaster and laughable. But when that point does come, it retroactively recasts how we are forced to view the film’s preceding events. The rug pull that DeMonaco orchestrates, while not exactly surprising in its general flavor — with this kind of film, you know roughly where it’s headed from the jump — does make an impact in establishing precisely the degree of ludicrousness the director is trading in. There’s a certain boldness inherent to any film this profoundly silly, and that’s a compliment. Suffice to say, the reason for The Home’s apparent D-level shoddiness, the reason why Max’s wannabe rest home Sherlock is so incompetent and why discoveries (like the blacklight-visible Xs marked on residents’ necks) arrive seemingly in double time, is playful and even kind of counterintuitively clever in a way few horror films are willing to risk these days. DeMonaco is delivering a bad film on purpose — though to the exact degree of intent remains blurry. That said, there’s a whole lot of slog to work through, and that the “joke” of it all is at the audience’s expense — in so far as subjecting viewers to a lot of bunk, whether ultimately winking or not — will still be an understandable hurdle for a lot of folks. And then there’s the issue of who the audience for this is exactly — by its very structure (which dampens its rewatchability) and its lack of gorehound fodder, there’s not a strong argument for cult status, nor much appeal to a Midnighter audience. The Home is ultimately more than it appears and executes its one campy gag confidently and with good humor, but it’s still likely to exhaust more viewers than not in the build to its punchline.
DIRECTOR: James DeMonaco; CAST: Pete Davidson, John Glover, Bruce Altman, ; DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions; IN THEATERS: July 25; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 37 min.
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