The Home (2025) Review | FrightFest

“Thicker than blood” is how Max as a child (Jagger Nelson) and the older Luke (Matthew Miniero) used to characterise their close bond. After all, they were not actual blood brothers but rather genetically unrelated foster children to loving couple Couper (Victor Williams) and Sylvia (Jessica Hecht) – and they were inseparable before Luke left for college, promising to be back. All this is revealed in flashback at the beginning of The Home, until little Max is informed by his devastated foster parents that Luke has committed suicide.

Now a decade later, Max (Pete Davidson) has those three words tattooed on his chest as a permanent reminder of Luke and, unable to recover from his sense of loss, is drifting in a limbo of drugs and delinquency. After Couper gets him off a prison stint by arranging for him to do community service staying and working at the Green Meadows retirement home in Upstate New York, young Max will for the first time find himself living in the company of the elderly. Yet even as media pundits debate over the airwaves whether a big approaching storm is caused by climate change or is merely an act of god (or goddess), Max once again cannot resist breaking all the rules that he is told upon arrival, and finds in the midst of this active, loving geriatric community, a series of increasingly alarming mysteries.

Why would someone so very highly qualified in brain surgery as Dr Sabian (Bruce Altman) end up the resident medic in an isolated, dead-end institution like this? What makes sprightly former Broadway actor Lou (John Glover) suddenly start horrifically self-harming? Why does kindly old Norma (Mary Beth Peil) furtively warn Max to get out? What has happened to the screaming man (Stuart Rudin) and other near-catatonic invalids on the forbidden fourth floor? Who is the grotesquely masked woman (Marilee Talkington) who keeps trying to reach out to Max online? And why does Max keep dreaming of being restrained with clamps forcing his eyelids open (A Clockwork Orange style) as a needle approaches his eye? Worried about the safety of his new aged family, determined to protect them and sniffing conspiracy, Max sets about investigating what is really going on in this home away from home, and gets his eyes on something thicker and more essential than blood.

Like Don Coscarelli’s Bubba Ho-tep (2002), Adrián García Bogliano’s Late Phases (2014), James Ashcroft’s The Rule of Jenny Pen (2024) and Mattias J Skoglund’s The Home (Hemmet, 2025), this latest feature from James DeMonaco, creator of the Purge films, locates creeping malice and mortality in a facility for the elderly. The Home is like Ron Howard’s Cocoon (1985) in a gimp mask being ridden hard by Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989), while its corridors, axes, group photos and sagging flesh evoke Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), and its serial eyeball threat conjures the spirit of Lucio Fulci. It comes so absurdly overdetermined, with so many narrative red herrings and garden paths, that the viewer is very unlikely to guess exactly where things are headed, although the build-up is so well handled, so chaotic and confounding, that the solution, when it eventually comes, seems bound to land a little disappointingly, and is overexplained to boot. Fortunately there is an ecstatically hyperviolent climax, hitting hard like a raging storm, which will make even the most jaded horror fan feel young again.