James DeMonaco’s The Home aims for nervy, eldercare horror with a topical edge, but lands as a muddled, overedited misfire anchored by a miscast Pete Davidson and a finale that mistakes shock for substance. What might have been eerie and cutting turns into a clattery carnival of hollow jumpscares, tonal whiplash, and an inarticulate twist that unravels whatever intrigue the setup had promised.
Setup and premise
The Home hinges on Max, a gaunt, tattooed drifter whose court-ordered community service lands him at Green Meadows, a retirement facility whose cozy facade conceals unclean noises, sealed floors, and carefully guarded secrets. The hook is tidy: a damaged young man, a too-quiet institution, rules about off-limits spaces, and residents who seem unusually chipper until they don’t. On paper, it’s a classic gateway into dread. On screen, it’s a conveyor belt of ominous clues that rarely pay off with resonance, only with noise and bluster.
DeMonaco’s decision to stitch Max’s past to his present through parallel cutting—boyhood memories of a foster brother’s college sendoff and subsequent suicide, intercut with Max’s nocturnal graffiti and haunted awakenings—telegraphs an emotional foundation. The intent is empathy; the effect is a manipulative fast-forward button mashed down, skipping across the surface of trauma rather than letting it settle. The film tells what it should quietly show, piling symbols atop symbols (the “our future is burning” mural; tattoos spelling out bonds and loss) without trusting a viewer’s patience or intelligence.
Performance and casting
Pete Davidson has a spontaneous, self-mocking presence that can electrify a room when the material meets him halfway. Here, the material keeps asking for an interiority he doesn’t locate. The default half-smile reads as a reaction shot in search of a richer subtext; when scenes ask for rawness—like a prison plea from a stepfather begging Max to course-correct—the moment goes slack, stranded between sincerity and snark. The supporting cast, including Mary Beth Peil and John Glover, hint at lives that might have lifted the film if they were allowed to be more than cryptic guides or grotesque signposts, but the script uses them mostly as flavoring for a puzzle-box that won’t solve cleanly.
Craft and mood
From its first minutes, the film moves with a twitchy, herky-jerky rhythm: quick cuts without musicality, jumpscares without earned silence, portentous sound cues that tip their hand three scenes early. As Max ignores warnings and creeps toward the forbidden fourth floor, the movie flirts with a sustained creep factor—a television wall muttering about industry and extraction; bodies slouched and leaking, half-present, half-elsewhere. For a heartbeat, it hints at something hard and memorable. Then the volume cranks, a scare lunges, and the fragile mood evaporates in a puff of comic overstatement.
DeMonaco wears his influences on his sleeve: the cold corridors and ritual undertones nod at Kubrick, while candy-colored reds and blues try to modernize the menace. But homages are invitations, not identities. The film translates theme into thesis statements and shock edits, flattening what could have been mythic. The production design often overperforms the material; what’s missing is the confidence to let a long shot breathe or a quiet exchange bloom into unease.
The horror mechanics
Horror thrives on timing and implication—the audience’s imagination doing as much work as the camera. Here, too many moments are routed through the loudest, bluntest path: closets that jolt, corridors that blare, and dream imagery that explains itself before it can unsettle. Max’s rule-breaking climb to the fourth floor should feel like a crossing into a sacred, sickened space; instead, the sequence behaves like a theme-park reveal, complete with explanatory detours that crush tension instead of curating it. The film’s sound design, set up as a dread engine, turns into a spoiler siren, telling viewers when to brace instead of letting them drift into fear on their own.
Themes it reaches for
Beneath the racket is a film straining to say something about generational theft and ecological despair. The elderly at Green Meadows seem to enjoy a platinum-tier retirement while Max’s generation stares into scarcity and wreckage—resources burnt through, futures pawned off, a planet branded with catastrophe. That intergenerational tension, the question of who gets ease and who inherits the bill, is a powerful fulcrum for horror. But The Home converts that anxiety into lectures and later plot spasms, not lived dread. The eco-horror touch, folded in late, arrives like a graft rather than an organic growth from the story’s roots.
Mystery versus mess
As clues stack—encrypted warnings, strangely unaging party photos, ominous medical fixations—the film suggests a conspiracy threading from Max’s childhood through Green Meadows’ present. There are flickers of a truly ghoulish idea: medicine and money keeping the old vibrant by grinding the young down, the fourth floor as a factory of off-screen exploitation, an altar to youth disguised as benevolence. In those moments, the movie glances at allegory with teeth. But the reveal machine sputters, spinning toward a finale that explains too much and says too little, turning subtext into outlandish literalism without the conviction to be operatic about it.
The turn and the fallout
Without itemizing beats best discovered in the watch, it’s fair to say the movie’s late-game twist tries to reframe the entire journey—family bonds, institutional rot, what Green Meadows is and who profits from its secrets. The difficulty isn’t that the development is outrageous; outrageous can be grand. It’s that the twist is articulated with such haste and such tonal disarray that it collapses the emotional scaffolding, rendering earlier signposts as clumsy foreshadowing rather than meaningful echoes. The climactic thrash of violence, meant as catharsis, lands like a tantrum: loud, flailing, briefly diverting, and then strangely empty.
What lingers
A handful of images stick: the syrupy glow of party-night blues and reds, an impaled fall that should devastate but is undercut by the rush to the next shock, the suggestive awfulness of that sealed floor. There’s a better film buried here—a patient, poisonous fable about how institutions chew people up while selling care as a product, about grief becoming a doorway predators can walk through. That movie peers out in the margins but gets smothered by the need to goose, to jolt, to underline every theme with a marker that squeaks.
The verdict
The Home wants to be a curveball: a star known for levity dropped into bleakness, an eldercare thriller with a conscience, an eco-horror parable for a burned-out generation. Instead, it becomes a case study in how overstatement can neuter dread and how a twist, mishandled, can unclench a story’s grip right when it should tighten. It’s not a total void—there are ideas clawing to get out—but the movie doesn’t trust silence, shadow, or subtext enough to let those ideas breathe. In the end, the loudest thing in the room isn’t the scream; it’s the missed opportunity.
– The film opened in late July 2025, positioned as a summer counterprogrammer, and was met with broadly negative notices that faulted its jittery construction, thin suspense, and misaligned lead performance while acknowledging glints of ambition beneath the din.
– Coverage across major outlets converged on the sense that the concept and cast could have yielded something sharper; what arrived instead felt formulaic in structure and unruly in execution, a mismatch between intent and delivery that the final act only intensified.
If there’s a mercy, it’s this: even a misfire with a pulse can spark conversation. The Home has one. It just keeps tripping over its own heartbeat.
