THE HOME - Mark Reviews Movies

The Home, Lionsgate / Roadside Attractions

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 25, 2025

The screenplay for The Home, written by director James DeMonaco and Adam Cantor, takes its protagonist and, by extension, us through so many paranoid possibilities that it's a challenge to keep up with them. That might ultimately be a good thing for the movie, because each new potential explanation for what's happening here is more ludicrous than the last.

It does all add up in the end. Well, it does to the extent that any silly conspiracy revolving around a local retirement facility could, at least. This is a movie that would probably be more successful if its central mystery remained a mystery or, maybe, didn't require so many characters telling its protagonist what could be, is, and isn't happening along the way.

That's because the atmosphere of DeMonaco's movie is appropriately and effectively creepy throughout. There are suggestions that someone or several people might be messing with the mind of main character Max (Pete Davidson), who is court-ordered to become the superintendent at the elder-care facility in order to avoid prison, and that the residents of the home might be the victims of widespread abuse by some nefarious party. The mere implications of some of these things are unsettling enough, so it's too bad the script has to go and ruin it all by teasing us with so many likely explanations.

Since it's also a modern horror movie, we also get a lot of attempts at bringing bigger ideas into the fold. Max, for example, grew up as a foster child in a close, loving home. It all turned for him, though, when his older foster brother, whom he saw as being closer than a blood relation, died by suicide after going off to college.

After years of grief and trauma and unanswered questions, Max has become aimless and rebellious in his life, with his most-recent arrest happening after he paints some street art on a building. His foster father (played by Victor Williams) knows the judge and convinces him to basically sentence Max to community service at a remotely located care facility.

Something is obviously amiss from Max's arrival, whether that be a resident staring at him through an upper-floor window, the rough attitudes of the orderlies on staff, catching a couple of residents having sex while wearing masks, or the way resident doctor Sabian (Bruce Altman) meets the new super and almost immediately comments on how "beautiful" his eyes are. Among the residents are a few noteworthy eccentrics, such as Lou (John Glover), who teaches acting exercises and is trying to keep up a healthy diet in case another role comes his way, and Norma (Mary Beth Peil), who takes to Max but obviously has a secret or two to hide.

Obviously, the movie has its secrets, too, as well as its red herrings and distractions and plenty of details that seem so important that, with the games the script plays, we eventually learn not to trust any of them. So much of what's initially established in the story eventually doesn't matter, and while that mostly has to do with various plot threads or pieces of information that are meant to keep us unaware of the truth, they also include anything about Max, beyond the fact that he's confounded and increasingly worried about what's happening in the home.

This isn't a slight against Davidson's performance, which shows that the usually comedic actor can pull off a more straightforward kind of performance—even if, in his efforts not to seem funny even by accident, his Max comes across as flat, as opposed to suspicious and sleep-deprived. Many an actor in a horror movie has just gone through the motions of what the plot and the scares require, though, and Davidson is too intriguing as a screen presence to imagine this material displays or will be the extent of his non-comedic turns.

The actual scares of the movie, by the way, fluctuate between those of the cheap variety, which accounts for several moments in which something shocking happens but it's revealed to be just a dream, and some legitimately unsettling ones. In that latter category, Max is warned early on to avoid the fourth floor of the facility, so of course, he heads up there on multiple occasions to witness try to learn the truth about the "troubled" residents there. DeMonaco's approach to this doesn't try to exploit its elderly characters and old-age concerns for shocks, which comes as a nice surprise, and indeed, at least some of these characters have more agency than we might imagine. To talk about how and why that's the case, though, might give too much away about where the story goes.

The resolution of The Home isn't simply shaky because of what's revealed, though. It's also in DeMonaco's approach to it, which adopts a blatantly satirical tone and conceit that comes out of nowhere in terms of the movie's plot and style. The movie may have a point to make about the generational divide, and in case that isn't apparent, a character literally hammers, as well as bludgeons and hatchets, it home.

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