Studio:   Miramax
Director: James DeMonaco
Writer:   James DeMonaco, Adam Cantor
Producer: Sebastien K. Lemercier, Bill Block
Stars:    Pete Davidson, John Glover, Bruce Altman, Mary Beth Peil, Jessica Hecht, Victor Williams, Mugga, Adam Cantor

Review Score:

Summary:

A troubled street artist uncovers a shocking conspiracy while working in a retirement home with peculiar residents.

Synopsis:

Max, a troubled street artist still haunted by the childhood memory of his foster parents Couper and Sylvia informing him that his beloved older brother Luke supposedly died while at college, gets arrested for graffiti. Instead of jail, Couper arranges for Max to perform community service as an onsite custodian at Green Meadows Retirement Home.

At the retirement home, Max is told by condescending coworkers Les and Juno that the fourth floor is off limits. In between peculiar experiences like finding an elderly couple having sex while wearing strange masks, Max befriends several residents including a woman named Norma and former actor Lou. Max also meets the facility’s resident doctor, Dr. Sabian, who curiously comments on Max’s eyes.

Regularly woken by vivid nightmares that make sleeping difficult, Max spends one late night in conversation with Norma. Max notices Norma has a miniature cup in a shape similar to one held by a statue outside the front entrance. Max also asks about a torn painting on Norma’s wall, which Norma explains was drawn by her deceased son Jacob, who later ripped it in half following an argument.

Repeated screams draw Max to the fourth floor where he finds catatonic, wheelchair-bound residents covered in unsightly wounds. One of the men musters surprising strength to lunge at Max in an apparent attack. Les and Juno arrive to pull the man away from Max. Dr. Sabian subsequently reprimands Max for entering a restricted area.

Max spies Norma arguing with Les and Dr. Sabian, but when he asks her about it later, she casually dismisses the altercation. In response to what she told him about her son, Max confides in Norma about his brother Luke’s death when Max was 11. Max then gifts Norma with a replacement he drew for the missing half of her son’s painting. Recognizing Max for his heart, Norma begins warning Max that something is wrong with Green Meadows and he needs to leave, but her warning is cut short.

Max is shocked when he witnesses Norma’s gruesome death after she falls from a great height to be impaled on an iron-wrought fence outside. Unconvinced by Dr. Sabian’s claim that Norma supposedly left a suicide note, Max tries telling Lou about Norma’s warning preceding her death, but Lou freezes up.

Someone leaves a blacklight in Max’s room that allows him to see a message that says, “find the marked ones.” Using the blacklight, Max finds a cross on the back of Lou’s neck. Max soon begins noticing multiple residents rubbing at the same spot on their own necks.

Les catches Max searching Norma’s empty room. With Max claiming he merely wished for a memento, Les tells Max that Norma’s belongings went to the basement for incineration. In the basement, Max recovers Norma’s miniature cup along with a diary whose entries cryptically claim “they come at night” and suggest residents are being “changed” through needles. Max again tries to tell Lou what he found, but he interrupts Lou mutilating himself by pulling out his own teeth with pliers.

From online research, Max learns Dr. Sabian was supposedly a neuroscientist whose studies on psychosis in elderly people led to him developing an experimental brain procedure and controversial eye therapy. While online, Max is lured into a chatroom where he meets a mysterious woman disguised by a distorted face. The faceless woman reappears on Max’s laptop later to continue providing clues and warnings.

Hidden cameras Max secretly placed throughout the building show what looks like the man on the fourth floor trying to communicate. The cameras also seemingly show Dr. Sabian, Les, and Juno performing unseen actions on a screaming person.

Upon returning to his room, Max is surprised by the faceless woman. Claiming her father is a fourth-floor resident, the woman tells Max the facility is part of a government-funded operation to secretly experiment on elderly residents and she needs Max’s help to expose the conspiracy.

The man from the fourth floor suddenly lunges at Max and the woman, causing Max to be knocked unconscious. When he recovers, Juno tells Max that Dr. Sabian will be performing tests on him to make sure he is okay.

Afraid of what might happen to him, Max sneaks out of the building and returns to his foster parents Couper and Sylvia, who introduce Max’s new foster sisters Tessa and Jackie. Max becomes alarmed when Sylvia uses a phrase similar to something Norma previously said to him.

After Couper and Sylvia leave, Tessa and Jackie recognize Norma’s miniature cup in Max’s possession. The two girls take Max to a secret room hidden in a closet where Max finds numerous cups as part of a shrine to Dea, the goddess of youth. Photo albums dating back decades show Max’s foster parents partying with Green Meadows staff and residents including Dr. Sabian, Les, Juno, Lou, and Norma, all of whom are unaged and have cup symbols drawn on their foreheads. Each album also includes a photo of everyone celebrating around a catatonic person in a wheelchair, one of whom Max recognizes as his brother Luke.

Realizing that the old man on the fourth floor is his brother, Max races back to the retirement home. Max reunites with Luke, but as he begins identifying everyone on the fourth floor as additional victims pictured in the photo albums, Les sneaks up from behind and renders Max unconscious.

When he recovers, Max finds himself restrained in a wheelchair while his foster parents have a party with Green Meadows staff and residents. Lou explains that everyone there is an actor and everything Max experienced was part of an elaborate ruse for their entertainment prior to making Max their next victim.

Sabian adds that behind a person’s right eye is a sac containing their goddess Dea’s nectar, which gives humans youth and vitality, but dries up as they age. Identifying nearly everyone in the room as at least 100 years old, Sabian tells Max they are going to drain his essence to rejuvenate themselves for their orgies while Max will become another fourth-floor prisoner.

After Sabian extracts the fluid from his eye, Max enters a partially catatonic state on the fourth floor. Summoning his limited strength, Luke uses a needle to collect Dea’s nectar from each prisoner in the room. After collecting the fluids in a jar, Luke has Max drink the liquid.

Juno comes to check on Max and is shocked when, with his vigor now restored, Max viciously slashes her to death. Armed with a hammer and hand ax, Max goes on a vengeful killing spree throughout Green Meadows while a raging hurricane destroys the building’s exterior. Couper, Sylvia, Sabian, Lou, and Les all end up among the dead. After slaughtering everyone and draining Lou’s nectar, Max helps Luke and the others from the fourth floor escape outside to safety after the storm subsides.

Review:

There comes a time in many “Saturday Night Live” cast members’ comedic careers when they diverge into drama, sometimes taking roles that lead to awards-show invitations. Dan Aykroyd traded his slime-soaked Ghostbusters uniform to help drive Miss Daisy, then earned himself an Oscar nomination for the switch. Bill Murray went from parodying lounge singers and golf course groundskeepers to playing historical figures like FDR, and got his own Oscar nod for “Lost in Translation.” Even Adam Sandler took time out from stand-up, novelty songs, and “Happy Gilmore” sequels to appear in critical darling “Uncut Gems.” Every now and again, I wonder what Chris Farley’s filmography might look like if he had lived long enough to press Pause on manic Matt Foley antics to get serious with an awards-bait role like a recovering alcoholic struggling to reunite with his dying daughter or something.

The jump from goofing around on SNL to more mainstream stardom didn’t take long for Pete Davidson. In the year immediately after he officially left Lorne Michaels’s venerable NBC staple, Davidson appeared in major Hollywood blockbusters including “Guardians of the Galaxy volume 3,” “Fast X,” and “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.” Of course, he wasn’t playing parts designed to attract the attention of Academy voters. But Davidson was starting to edge away from totally typecast roles as underachieving stoners and dimwitted doofuses.

A horror/thriller rather than an arthouse indie, “The Home” isn’t going to put Pete Davidson on the path toward taking home a gold statue. The first time we see his character, Max, he’s waking up on a couch in a dingy apartment with a big bong and a lava lamp on nearby tables. The next time we see Max, he’s getting arrested for street graffiti. So far, Max is what you’d expect from an extension of Davidson’s onscreen persona. However, Max is also a former foster child haunted by the memory of his older brother’s death, so there’s more to the man than recreational drugs and regularly running into trouble with cops.

Forced to perform community service, Max gets a gig as an onsite custodian at Green Meadows Retirement Home. Reminding you once more that “The Home” is a horror movie, this naturally means the facility is populated with peculiar people and nefarious activities taking place behind closed doors.

“The Home” is directed and co-written by James DeMonaco, best known as the founder of “The Purge” franchise. Looking back, it’s remarkable how prescient DeMonaco was with his first Purge feature in 2013. At the time, the most unbelievable aspect of the movie was the premise that the American government would ever legalize bloodshed on a national scale. Now, the only unbelievable thing about the idea is that it hasn’t happened already. In contemporary America, awful actions occur out in the open, which may be more frightening than evil acts occurring in secret. So in a way, it’s weird to see DeMonaco scale back scope for a self-contained story about a clandestine conspiracy whose continued operation hinges on how much one man’s meddling might expose.

If “The Home” were to be graded on its first third alone, it would earn a bored thumbs down. The movie’s leisurely start challenges waning attention spans to stick with a slow setup, all while every element introduced appears to be a seed for a predictable plot beat inevitably sprouting up down the line.

The first thing Max learns upon arrival at Green Meadows is that the fourth floor is strictly off limits, never mind how many shrieking howls he hears coming from upstairs. His first day also includes walking in on a white-haired couple having sex while wearing masks like they’re hairless furries from “The Shining.” Co-workers overseen by a suspicious doctor treat Max condescendingly. It’s not 24/7 weirdness, however. Max manages to make friends with a kindly old woman by commiserating over the unfortunate deaths of his brother and her son.

How long will viewers have to sit still before Max breaks the rules by sneaking into the restricted era? Will the horrors he discovers there include the mad doctor performing grotesque experiments on unwitting residents? When will the one seemingly good-hearted person try to warn Max about the truth only to end up dead? Is it too late to turn off “The Home” and watch something more original instead?

Fortunately for the film, creative works are graded as an entire experience, and “The Home’s” bonkers back half has an easier time winning back lost points from anyone still paying attention. The story’s direction follows a mostly familiar road overall, though it’s the big-swing swerves into visceral shocks like sudden deaths and flinch-triggering eye trauma where the movie really makes its hay. “The Home” has the outward appearance of being slow-burn suspense made with some money and a couple of recognizable faces, but its essential organs are grown out of grindhouse gruesomeness and B-movie battiness.

It's almost, although not quite, two different tales stitched together as one. The first part is an endurance test to see how many yawns you can stifle while your open mouth inhales cliché after cliché. Then the second half hits a higher gear where dementedness dominates nearly everything onscreen. Performances become more animated. Sillier stylings turn sinister. And the horror dares the MPA evaluator to ask, “does this still fall within the bounds of an R rating?” To be sure, “The Home” tries its audience’s patience at the outset, but the film eventually rewards those willing to wait it out with several wicked sights and surprises.

Review Score: 65