The Home Review: Cheap Scare Elder Care

James DeMonaco’s horror movie The Home traps Pete Davidson in a retirement facility thriller that’s more tedious than terrifying.

Davidson, for all his tabloid turbulence and sleepy-eyed energy, is no stranger to playing an emotional mess on film. He’s navigated it surprisingly well in well-reviewed but little-seen titles, The King of Staten Island and Bodies Bodies Bodies. Maybe this was his shot at an off-kilter, emotionally wrecked lead that finally did some business at the box office and capitalized on his surprising emotional depth and comedic restraint. Maybe.

Unfortunately, I was wrong.

The Home opens its doors with promise. Davidson plays Max, a graffiti artist with a rap sheet and a dead foster brother named Luke looming over his every move. After his latest tagging stunt, an ode to the long-deceased Luke, his foster parents, Sylvia (Jessica Hecht, Breaking Bad) and Couper (Victor Williams, The King of Queens) cut a deal to keep him out of jail. Sentenced to four months of community service at Green Meadows, a disturbingly serene retirement home buried deep in upstate New York’s woods, he’s assigned janitorial duties among residents who couldn’t feel further from his urban world.

Expecting crushing boredom but instead finding vibrant, sharp-witted elderlies full of unexpected life, Max doesn’t make friends with the orderlies (co-writer Adam Cantor and Mugga) but does cozy up to a few of the residents. Soon, Norma (Mary Beth Peil, The Good Wife), one of the few residents with both wit and warmth, and Lou (John Glover, Smallville), a flamboyant former stage star, start to feel like the friendly relatives he never had. Like any genre-savvy viewer, Max quickly learns that Green Meadows isn’t just about bingo and Jell-O cups. There’s something sinister on the forbidden fourth floor, where residents stare blankly from wheelchairs. Some residents aren’t who they seem, and others vanish completely. Nighttime brings screams, shifting shadows, and bodies that fall from windows.

Davidson delivers an oddly compelling performance, doing what he can by carrying an undercurrent of genuine grief that rarely connects with the world around him. It’s as if he were acting in a different film, one with better writing and a director more interested in character than cheap horror theatrics. There’s the faintest hint of wisdom beneath his usual half-lidded delivery; a sense of trauma still raw, a kid out of place in every room. When he shares scenes with Peil’s Norma, we get a fleeting glimpse at what this film could have been: a character-driven thriller about grief and connection. Instead, what we get is an endless carousel of cheap dream sequences and horror gimmicks that go nowhere.

Peil becomes the movie’s secret weapon. A veteran of stage and screen, she injects genuine warmth and intelligence into a film that barely deserves her. As Norma, she becomes Max’s unlikely ally, bringing out his humanity while quietly stealing every scene. Glover, as always, does his quirky theatrical best as colorful resident Lou, though he’s given frustratingly little to work with outside of “grievously kooky” dialed up to 10.

Unfortunately, DeMonaco’s experience crafting The Purge saga hasn’t translated into knowing how to build genuine scares or develop coherent narratives. He seems convinced he’s saying something profound about generational neglect or institutional rot. He hints at it; residents being forgotten, young people losing their footing, systems failing everyone, but never commits. Instead, logic collapses, and the story spins into 94 minutes of incoherence. Rather than pushing Max further into a paranoid spiral, DeMonaco lets the plot wander in circles. Timelines blur. People die or disappear with no consequence. Every time the plot threatens to build momentum, it hits the brakes with another fake-out scare or lazy edit.

The technical elements don’t help matters. Green Meadows, designed with about as much subtlety as a Spirit Halloween store that has taken over an old Bed, Bath, and Beyond, is filled with flickering lights and set dressing that screams “temporary.” Cinematographer Anastas N. Michos throws every filter and lens trick into the mix, as if testing features on a new camera app. There’s one effective black light sequence that’s eerie, disorienting, and briefly effective, but it feels like a half-baked idea dropped in from a better movie. The real horror is Todd E. Miller’s choppy, restless editing that never lets a scene breathe. It only intensifies the chaos. Couple that with Nathan Whitehead’s blaring, joyless score that mistakes volume for tension, and you’ve got a physically exhausting experience.

I kept waiting for the movie to mean something. For brief moments, The Home suggests more profound social observations, but it becomes another “aren’t old people just the worst?” exercise. But DeMonaco can’t follow through, instead doubling down on grotesque body horror that tries to shock its way to relevance. The finale descends into an all-out bloodbath featuring various bodily fluids, with one spiked fence sequence proving particularly gnarly. Some horror fans might cling to these final 15 minutes, mistaking viscera for the catharsis they paid for, but strip away the gore and The Home is hollow. It doesn’t work. It’s not scary. It’s just unpleasant.

The Home is now available to watch in US & Canadian theaters, in UK & Irish cinemas, and globally in theaters.