Depicting a harrowing night in an old house with ghostly apparitions, this slow-paced horror flick uses its creeping camera movements to elicit terror. But despite occasional successes, Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives mostly drudges up a hollow experience with a threadbare story.
★★☆☆☆
One-take movies are incredibly difficult to master. Not only do they require an extraordinary amount of planning and dedication, the entire experience is predicated on dozens of lightning-in-a-bottle moments happening in real time to capture the magic behind great filmmaking. But there’s also the problem of whether this technique actually enhances the other qualities of the movie, or if it simply feels like a pretentious ploy to hook viewers, failing to understand the rhythms of storytelling as it prioritises technical flashiness over substance. With these potential avenues for failure in mind, Thomas Sieben’s Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives is an impressive feat. But that doesn’t mean it makes for a compelling, or even interesting, watch.
Home Sweet Home follows Maria (Nilam Farooq), a pregnant woman staying at her father-in-law Wilhelm’s (Justus von Dohnány) old house, which her and her fiancé Viktor (David Kross) are renovating into a B & B. While Viktor is stuck at work waiting to give an important presentation, Maria is left to her own devices. This soon proves to be perilous, partly due to a health concern when she notices that she is bleeding, and also down to the apparitions that appear in the corner of her eye in this old home.
More so than most one-take movies, Home Sweet Home lives or dies on its format, as that is what excuses the threadbare story. It is very difficult to capture the reality of day-to-day experiences — even more so when they are depicted in real time — and not feel as if the story depicting them has no centre or driving force behind it. Sieben’s film proves this general rule here, as Home Sweet Home would be absurdly empty and devoid of conflict if it followed a different format. But at the same time, the fact that all of this is depicted in one take actually takes away from the interesting narrative possibilities the movie hints at, but never explores in depth.
Wandering through this creaky, eerie home, Maria comes across a hidden room, where she reads journal entries from a German soldier stationed in German South West Africa (now Namibia). It doesn’t exactly feel natural for Maria to read aloud these excerpts, but it is a necessity given this film’s format. As she does, these moments aren’t just ominous, paralleling jump scares and creeping tension with the moral rot at the heart of colonialism, they also imply a world that exists far beyond the movie’s single location, whose ghostly tendrils appear to have infiltrated this old house.
Unfortunately, these concepts are often expressed through apparitions appearing for a second and then vanishing from sight. In one egregious instance of this it is only the viewer that witnesses a ghost staring at Maria, a cheap thrill that is especially damning here, since the whole point of this one-take formula is that Maria is the viewer’s conduit for this experience. If, say, an object halfway across the room suddenly commands her attention, the camera will shift towards it and linger there. But Home Sweet Home ignores this at times to build up artificial scares. Other moments featuring the apparitions are more effective, where they linger for just long enough that Maria is able to glimpse them out of the corner of her eye. This, when coupled with the disturbing testimony of a century-old text documenting abuses of a native population, make it entirely understandable why Maria is so unsettled.
But will many viewers be? Outside of some creepy moments where she slowly wanders through a room, or one or two effective jump scares right after this, very little is actually scary about the experience. Home Sweet Home is often dull, as it has very little to say about its characters or mythology. While the inclusion of the diary presents a promising start, not enough is expanded upon from this intriguing premise. (The exception to this is an excellent surrealist scene, melding reality and the fantastical, dreaming and waking, with the one-take approach making this otherwise ethereal moment feel lucid and chilling). Home Sweet Home ticks off the horror movie checklist — a jump scare here, a red herring there, and so on — but doesn’t offer a satisfying or engrossing artistic experience. Farooq is the clear highlight of this small cast, offering a grounded performance as a woman very close to labour who is struggling to maintain her composure in the face of danger. The rest of the actors are fine, but don’t sell their performances in a noteworthy way; like with many elements in this film, they are serviceable at their craft.
Home Sweet Home obviously wants to comment on the horrors of colonialism and its haunting presence today, as well as how complicity through inaction is just as damaging as engaging in brutality, but it has no effective conduit for these ideas beyond their introduction into the story. More character dynamics, whether playful or ominous, would have gone a long way towards endearing viewers to these characters, while allowing us to learn about this strange world they inhabit more organically. Such scenes also would have padded out the film’s runtime, perhaps just enough to where Home Sweet Home didn’t feel so empty after watching it.
The Verdict
Despite its technical competence and flashes of filmmaking potential, Thomas Sieben’s one-take horror movie lacks a compelling reason to care about its story, offering little to reflect on or enjoy. Similarly, Home Sweet Home’s thematic subtext squanders its intrigue by failing to flesh out its ideas.
Words by Cian McGrath
Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives is available on digital platforms from 30th September from Blue Finch Film Releasing.
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