Approximations of the title Home Sweet Home are very commonplace in media. There’s a 1981 Thanksgiving-themed slasher that goes by the name, as well as a rom-com from a few years back that (according to its IMDB page) revolves around a coffee shop barista wooing the man of her dreams by pretending to be devoutly […]
Approximations of the title Home Sweet Home are very commonplace in media. There’s a 1981 Thanksgiving-themed slasher that goes by the name, as well as a rom-com from a few years back that (according to its IMDB page) revolves around a coffee shop barista wooing the man of her dreams by pretending to be devoutly Christian. Should you drop the first “Home” from the title, then you’ve also got a South Korean apocalyptic TV show added into the mix, alongside a Capcom classic that is widely considered to be the forefather of Resident Evil.
The point is that it can be hard to google Home Sweet Home with any real specificity, and even filtering by the word “horror” won’t narrow the search down as much as you might think. For the uninitiated, it can therefore be a little confusing trying to discern what Home Sweet Home: Rebirth is meant to be a “Rebirth” of, exactly. Is it a revival of a forgotten Halloween knock-off? A continuation of a beloved streaming series? An adaptation of a seminal JRPG? Or a sequel to some Hallmark Channel-esque confection?
For the avoidance of any doubt then, this Thai-American coproduction is in fact based on a relatively obscure indie horror game that was developed by Yggdrazil Group and released episodically between 2017 and 2019. Although even die-hard fans will struggle to trace the film’s origins back to that source material, given how many creative liberties have been taken here.
If you haven’t played Yggrazil’s chiller, its USP was that it took the basic framework of your typical Outlast-style helpless horror game and steeped it in Southeast Asian folklore, as well as Buddhist spirituality. So rather than evading giant naked mental patients who were intent on rending you limb from limb, you instead had to evade giant naked “Preta” demons who were (equally) intent on rending you limb from limb.
In a nutshell, the story had you traversing a purgatorial realm known as “The Hinderance,” where sinners burdened with lingering earthly attachments are left to suffer for all eternity. Determined to rescue your wife from such a miserable fate, you embarked on a quest across this nightmarish plane; along the way facing off against the malevolent revenants of those who, in a past life, failed to adhere to one of the five Buddhist precepts (think the 10 Commandments only there’s less of them to remember).
It was an intriguing spin on what was, at the time, becoming an increasingly stale formula. Indeed, the prominent use of Thai culture — baked into everything from the enemy design to the heavy emphasis on Karma and the way you would often have to perform sacred rituals in order to progress — made the tired hide-and-seek gameplay feel brand new again.
The thing is, I might as well have just described the premise of that faith-based rom-com mentioned up top for all the resemblance this new movie bears to Yggrazil’s version of Home Sweet Home. Granted, the broadest of broad strokes have been carried over, with the limbo-like Hinderance featuring prominently and a confrontation between a novitiate monk and his necromancer nemesis taking centre stage (which is, superficially, what the final instalment in the game series was about).
Yet otherwise this strips away pretty much everything interesting and uniquely Thai about the original IP. The dialogue is almost entirely in English for a start, as our protagonists are cast as tourists visiting Bangkok, rather than locals as they were in the original.
Gone too are the culturally-specific antagonists — like the striking Krause or the spectral Thai dancer — as well as the traditional rituals that we’re used to combat them. In their place, we are instead saddled with far more generic hellspawn (e.g. insectoid monsters and winged demons) that serve only to clog up a bunch of CGI-laden, slow-mo-smothered action sequences that are themselves completely devoid of tension.
Speaking of which, the Home Sweet Home video game had its faults — from the repetitive stealth encounters to its clumsily fragmented release strategy, poorly explained objectives, and severe balancing issues — but one thing it undeniably excelled at was delivering the scares. More so than a lot of better horror outings in fact. Even seasoned genre veterans were liable to get freaked out by some of the more unsettling imagery it threw at you, and by the way it made you feel utterly powerless and alone whilst skulking around in the dark.
Which just makes it all the more mystifying that the team behind Rebirth have decided to make a sun-drenched, trigger-happy action movie! One that owes a far greater debt to something like World War Z than it does to any authentic Thai folklore or regional urban legends.
Even the inciting incident is overblown, with our lead character Jake (played by The Chronicles of Narnia’s William Moseley) getting caught in The Hinderance after failing to thwart a mass shooting in a shopping mall. Indeed, we’re not even 15 minutes in before the first shootout has occurred and any pretense that we’re in for a proper horror film has been decisively dropped; along with all of the Thai mythology.
And things only get more frenetic from thereon out, as Jake is enlisted in an ancient war against evil (by that aforementioned novice monk) and promptly embarks on a quest to stop the gates of Hell from opening. All of which he takes in his stride, because there’s no time whatsoever to let any of these crazy revelations or major developments breathe. We’ve just got to obligatorily move from one underwhelming set-piece to the next.
At a certain point, the film does threaten to liven up a little when the iconic boxcutter-girl from the game shows up, but any hopes that she will be as creepy as she was in her previous incarnation are dashed when it turns out she is nothing more than a recognisable cosplay for fans to do the Rick Dalton finger point meme at. Her tragic backstory has been totally ignored, her haunting wails have been replaced by generic clicking sounds, and the makeup isn’t half as grisly as it ought to be. Rendering her nothing but a shadow of her former self.
When compared to some of her fellow game alumni, however, boxcutter girl has been given the respectful A-list treatment. A towering, rotting corpse with one glowing red eye and a mouth the size of a pinhole, the Preta had a really cool design before, yet Rebirth inexplicably morphs him as a lame Attack on Titan knock-off. And as for the Dancer, the most representation she gets here is via a half-hearted easter egg in a costume store.
The movie does occasionally gesture towards its alleged source material by including some other tiny scraps of familiar iconography (like the Nona-metal knife and the blood portals), but it’s all so carelessly done and unsatisfying. In fact, their inclusion recalls how Christophe Gans would haphazardly shoehorn classic characters and locations into his Silent Hill movies, without giving any thought as to why they were so popular in the first place or what relevance they had to the story.
Still, that empty fan service arguably works better than the other half of Rebirth, in which we follow Jake’s wife (a committed Urassaya Sperbund) traversing a bland zombie apocalypse over in the real world. I say “zombie” because, for all intents and purposes, that’s what the threat here ultimately boils down to. The script insists that they are just regular people who have been possessed by wicked entities from the Hindrance, but if it looks like a zombie, moves like a zombie and groans like a zombie, then it’s a fucking zombie in my book. Anyway, this whole section of the film is an arduous slog; featuring incredibly weak gore, little in the way of narrative thrust, and ineptly staged chases that just make the creatures in question look easily outmanoeuvred.
Which brings me to the most important criticism of all. Putting aside issues of fidelity and pedantry over the adaptation, Home Sweet Home: Rebirth just isn’t very good when judged according to its own merits. Deeming the acting to be “inconsistent” would be an incredibly charitable understatement and the VFX are also iffy across the board. Not to mention, the exposition-heavy dialogue is very clunky in the final stretch.
Truth be told, the production veers dangerously close to Uwe Boll territory at times. Yet there are a few saving graces that prevent it from being a complete train wreck. Although it feels out of place, the John Wick-esque fight choreography is surprisingly solid, for instance, while directors Alexander Kiesl and Steffen Hacke get some decent mileage out of their drone camera. Plus, I suspect the Thailand Film Board (namedropped in the credits) will be pleased with how attractive Bangkok is made to look in the extensive montage sequences that go out of their way to show you how nice the city’s various hotels, marketplaces and service staff are.
Of course, that last point isn’t going to be of much solace to your average viewer yet after a while I did start to wonder who this was made for anyway. It’s not anywhere near scary enough for horror audiences, nor is the action impressive enough to wow those craving spectacle.
Meanwhile, gamers are going to be outright pissed given that— much like Netflix’s recent The Electric State — this is an adaptation that has only the loosest possible connection to the material it is ostensibly based on. Everything from the tone to the visual style and even the genre has been changed to make a dumb-as-a-rock action flick. Why they decided to take that approach (when it’s presumably costlier than an intimate horror) is anybody’s guess but, suffice it to say, it ain’t gonna appease existing fans and I’m doubtful the shoddy end result will win over many new ones either.
Which is a shame, because there was real potential in this IP. Unfortunately, it seems for the time being that Home Sweet Home peaked with its janky, albeit effective, gaming debut.
