JACK GOES HOME (2016)

Studio:       Momentum Pictures
Director:    Thomas Dekker
Writer:       Thomas Dekker
Producer:  Jordan Yale Levine, Scott Levenson, Thomas Dekker, Jason Rose
Stars:     Rory Culkin, Lin Shaye, Daveigh Chase, Louis Hunter, Nikki Reed, Britt Robertson

Review Score:

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Summary:

A devastating tragedy forces a young man to confront haunting family secrets buried deep in his mind.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Jack Thurlow receives word that his parents were involved in a fatal car accident. Jack’s mother Teresa survived, but his father Damian’s head was severed in the crash.

Jack passively relays the news to his fiancée Cleo, who is pregnant with their unborn son Andy, over Facetime, as Cleo is away visiting her ill grandmother.

Shanda, Jack’s best friend since childhood, comes to comfort Jack. Jack sleepwalks during the night, muttering cryptically about the attic before unknowingly becoming physically violent toward Shanda.

Jack leaves Los Angeles to visit his mother at her house. On their first night together, Jack and Teresa have a tense confrontation over their grieving processes that stems from their troubled past relationship.

Jack finds an old cassette tape in the attic labeled ‘For Jack.’ He also briefly meets a receptionist named Nancy when he picks up his mother’s dog Rusty at the vet. Shanda comes to the house and privately confesses that Jack’s mother always scared her.

Jack meets his mother’s homosexual neighbor, 19-year-old Duncan, who invites Jack over for cocaine. The two young men talk about their fathers until Jack insults Duncan and leaves. They later apologize to each other using messages posted in their windows.

On the cassette, Jack’s father cryptically instructs Jack to search the attic when he is an adult. Jack finds the attic inexplicably locked, leading to another angry confrontation with his mother, who discourages her son from going up there.

Teresa walks out on Jack’s eulogy during the funeral. Shanda comes over the house afterward for conversation and marijuana. She and Jack go dancing at a club where Jack runs into Duncan. Duncan introduces Jack to Sven, who reads Jack’s palm and laughingly claims Jack is already dead. Jack and Duncan have another argument.

Jack makes it into the attic and finds a stack of VHS tapes along with a locked briefcase. Something seemingly attacks him in the dark when the light goes out briefly.

Following more bizarre behavior from his mother, Jack watches video footage of himself as an infant on one of the VHS tapes. Jack is shocked when the camera pulls back to reveal a twin brother named Andy. Flashes on the tape depict Jack’s father yelling because of Jack’s constant crying followed by an image of baby Andy floating face down in the bathtub.

Jack opens the briefcase and finds case records, photos, and papers revealing Jack was sexually abused by the family’s 46-year-old neighbor Don Rogers and Don’s 19-year-old-son Luke. The next day, Jack shows all of the documents to Shanda.

Jack listens to a cassette labeled ‘I’m Sorry.’ On it, Jack’s father apologizes and says that the Devil is inside Jack now. Hands suddenly start grabbing at Jack as small demons crash through windows and chase him. Upstairs, Teresa asks to cuddle with Jack like they used to do with Andy. Jack locks his mother in a closet, later opening it to find only a bloody jacket.

Shanda tells her girlfriend Crystal that she is worried about Jack.

Jack takes a walk with Duncan. Duncan kisses Jack. Their conversation is interrupted by an urgent text message from Cleo.

Jack returns home and has another tense confrontation with Teresa. He then Facetimes his fiancée and learns that Cleo lost their baby. Jack abruptly ends their call.

Jack forces his mother to reveal details about the case report in the briefcase. Teresa explains that 19-year-old Luke was Jack’s babysitter. Jack used to vomit every morning after Luke watched him. Luke and his father Don eventually confessed to molesting Jack and they were convicted at trial.

Putting a shard of glass to her throat, Jack demands Teresa tell him about Andy. She reveals that Jack’s constant crying as a baby drove his father crazy. Mistaking Andy for Jack, Damian drowned Andy to stop Jack’s crying. Teresa tells Jack that he should have been the baby that was killed.

Teresa runs outside and drives away. Duncan comes over. With Jack in a catatonic state, Duncan undoes his pants and begins sexually assaulting Jack. Teresa returns home, picks up her dog, and seemingly kills Duncan with a kitchen knife. Jack comes out of his trance to see that Duncan is sitting safely in the corner of his bedroom, but Rusty is dead.

Shanda comes over to find Jack covered in blood, refusing to hand over the dog’s carcass. Behaving bizarrely, Jack suddenly slaps Shanda and forces her to leave.

In the bathtub, Jack has a vision of Duncan telling him that he knows what he has to do. Jack drugs his mother’s drink and dances with her until she falls unconscious. A neighbor named Linda comes to the door to offer her condolences.

Jack puts his mom in the car. A creature appears and breaks through a car window as Jack drives away. Jack drives Teresa to the scene of her car accident, beats her, and prepares to stab her until Shanda interrupts by firing a gun. Shanda shows Jack that his mother isn’t really there. Teresa died in the same car crash as Jack’s father. Shanda had not previously said anything because she presumed Jack’s hallucinations were part of his healing process.

Shanda drives Jack back to his mother’s house. Shanda is confused to hear music playing from inside. Jack claims it is coming from his mother. Insisting that he cannot keep Teresa waiting, Jack goes inside and shuts the door on Shanda.

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"Jack Goes Home" comes to VOD and select U.S. theaters on Friday, October 14th from Momentum Pictures.

Review:

By his own admission, Jack Thurlow is a “pretentious little f*ck.”  He’s not wrong.  Jack brims with the smug ennui of a causeless rebel, thinking himself so culturally superior that he can’t resist condescendingly correcting another contemptuous millennial on his comprehension of the word “pontificate.”

Jack works at a magazine, so he knows something of linguistic nuance.  You can still hear eyes rolling, both yours and those of the person he is talking to, when Jack lightly lectures on the difference between “man” and “bro” as a preferable pronoun.

Acerbic is a charitable way of describing Jack, making his oppressively depressive personality an obstacle in getting onboard “Jack Goes Home.”  He simultaneous embraces and alienates everyone around him.  It would be laboriously draining having someone like Jack in your everyday life.  Asking an audience to empathize with someone so irritating even for 100 minutes can be the same sort of chore.

You don’t really warm to Jack over the course of the movie so much as Rory Culkin forces you to pay attention anyway through sheer force of his quietly simmering to a boil performance.  Never mind family ties or supporting roles as a child and young adult.  “Jack Goes Home” is Rory Culkin in full stride as an assertive, experienced lead.  Culkin carries the film to fruition by having Jack swallow him whole in order to emerge as a convincingly complex character who is compelling in spite of coming across as caustic.

Jack’s shoulder chip slumps down when he receives word of a grotesque car accident that beheaded his father.  His mother Teresa survived.  After catatonically relaying the tragic news to his pregnant fiancée over Facetime, Jack leaves Los Angeles to comfort grieving Teresa back at his childhood home.

Unspoken old wounds reopen when mother and son reunite.  Cordially copasetic on the outside, torn by past problems on the inside, their relationship takes another tumultuous turn once Jack discovers an audio cassette recorded when he was an infant.  The man may be dead, but the voice of Jack’s father is about to guide Jack through a mystery that has haunted their family for decades.  As he unwraps new clues, Jack unravels buried memories.  The psychological storm swelling in Jack’s mind now has him questioning what is even real and who he really is.

Accomplished young actor turned burgeoning writer/director Thomas Dekker used his script to write himself out of depression following his own father’s death.  His personal demons play out by way of confrontational themes involving childhood trauma, sexual orientation, parental bonds, and personal identity.

This is not a “ghost goes boo” fright flick.  “Jack Goes Home” is an introspective character deconstruction with an arthouse indie skin first, and a psycho-thriller with slight swaths of commercial horror second.  Anticipation for more of the latter instead of the former comes with complaints about conventions like hallucinatory demons grabbing from darkness, locked boxes in attics, and sinister secrets threatening to tear apart an already fractured family.  Really, these tropes are empty vessels intended for occupation by illustrations of Jack’s continually crumbling emotional mindscape.

“Jack Goes Home” remains confident about what it means to do on an emotional level, even when the movie is doing too much of it.  Conversationally smart dialogue melts organically into a melancholic mood, though scenes themselves become overlong and overindulgent.

Being an actor himself, Dekker falls headfirst into the fledgling filmmaker trap of seeing every second of each performance as essential.  They aren’t.  Minutes are misused slowing the story’s speed for what essentially amounts to unnecessary cameos featuring Nikki Reed and Natasha Lyonne in particular.

In retrospect, a late scene of a concerned neighbor offering condolences at an inopportune time seems to be some sort of vague substantiation of an upcoming reveal.  In the moment, it’s a deflated stab at tension distracting from the main arc of Jack’s deteriorating slide into possible insanity.

One scene, and only this one scene, doesn’t include Jack (Daveigh Chase discussing Jack with Nikki Reed).  Dekker, perhaps unknowingly, betrays his character study by breaking away from Jack’s point of view for this instant, undermining the illusion of bewilderment regarding how much of what Jack is seeing is real and how much may be imagined.

It’s the movie’s own fault for losing viewers through dour characters wandering astray into unimportance.  Despite this dragging first hour however, the setup takes a sudden turn into a third act that is infectiously arresting.  The steady build of presumed pomp and mumblecore pretension comes down swiftly when “Jack Goes Home” bores straight into our own individual discomfort zones, revealing the movie as an effective exercise in cerebral disturbance, not straightforward shock.

See past the Shyamalan curveball, which drops in the dirt anyway, to contemplate subtext and “Jack Goes Home” is a thoughtful thriller settling inside you perhaps without realizing it.  “Scary” or even “entertaining” don’t fit its description.  The film is more nontraditionally haunting than that.  When the movie sleepwalks, it takes attention spans with it.  Yet in those moments when it finds an inroad to frayed nerves, “Jack Goes Home” has a way of alarmingly challenging perceptions that is hard to shake from your head.

Review Score:  70

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