THE HOME Review: Pete Davidson Vs. Creepy Old Folks

Writer-director James DeMonaco rebounds from the little-seen 2021 drama This Is the Night with the psychological thriller The Home, and it’s hard to tell if the earlier movie was a reward from longtime producer Jason Blum for DeMonaco’s many years of making installments of The Purge, or this one is a repayment to Blum for letting him make something that isn’t horror. Either way, the filmmaker’s latest not only exudes a constant air of unenthusiastic obligation, but underscores the growing realization that he’s better at coming up with concepts than fulfilling them with a cohesive story.

Starring Pete Davidson, The Home returns DeMonaco to the genre that earned him an artistic (and perhaps more importantly, commercial) pedigree, which may be enough to entice moviegoers to embark on another horrific journey with him. But a lackluster performance from Davidson fails to hold together an increasingly nonsensical plot, forcing the co-writer and director to increasingly rely upon misdirection and a rote sense of “weirdness” to make its anemic premise seem fully baked.

Davidson plays Max, a troubled not-so-young man who gets sentenced by a judge to community service at a retirement home after exercising his talent as a graffiti artist on the very public side of a building. Still haunted by the death of his foster brother decades earlier, he undertakes his new job with reluctant enthusiasm, but quickly bonds with the residents, in particular the luminous Norma (Mary Beth Peil) and the community’s self-appointed theater director Lou (John Glover). But in contrast to his growing comfort in his role as janitor and occasional caretaker, he begins experiencing painful, violent visions in his sleep that make him question the facility’s sunny façade.

Venturing into areas in the home that he was told were forbidden, Max starts to suspect that not all is as it seems, especially after one of the otherwise catatonic patients on the mysterious fourth floor attacks him unprompted. Torn between his affection for the residents, his desire to repair his relationship with his foster parents and the increasingly undeniable realization that something deeply wrong is going on, Max is forced to decide whether or not to investigate further, even it means risking his life.