★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Intensity 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Mattias J. Skoglund
Memories of abuse are not the only things haunting an elderly mother and her adult son in this disquieting supernatural chiller.
Official synopsis: Joel reluctantly returns to his childhood home to help his mother, who has suffered a severe stroke, which left her clinically dead for several minutes. Although she is now alive, she doesn’t seem herself and Joel is convinced that something has followed her back from the other side.
Horror involving the elderly has been a hot cinematic subgenre in recent years, and Sweden/Iceland/Estonia coproduction The Home is one of the latest entries. It’s a riveting feature that meshes personal demons with otherworldly ones.
Monika (Anki Lidén) suffers a stroke when she is home alone — Or is she? — and her estranged son Joel (Philip Oros) returns home after some years to help her settle in at a nursing home for the elderly. Ghosts and bad habits from Joel’s past emerge, including substance abuse and memories of verbal and physical abuse at the hands of his deceased father Bengt (Peter Jankert). Luckily for Joel, he has a sympathetic ear in old school chum Nina (Gizem Erdogan). As Monika insists that Bengt is still present, what seems at first to Joel and Nina — she works at the care facility — like visions from possible dementia soon become more realistic, and though the specter of Bengt is certainly after his still-living family members, his reign of terror is not limited to them.
Director Mattias Johansson Skoglund, who cowrote the screenplay with Mats Strandberg, has crafted a powerful tale of family pain and the PTSD that can affect victims of spousal and child abuse. The characters are well written, developed, and acted, with Oros, Erdogan, and Lidén heading up a fine cast.
Skoglund invests The Home with a sense of lingering dread, punctuated with sudden shocking scenes of violence. The horror and drama are marvelously balanced, resulting in a fear-fare feature that is certain to leave viewers pensive long after the ending credits finish.
Review by Joseph Perry
The Home had its world premiere on March 11, 2025, at SXSW.
