The Home - Film Review - Eye For Film (2025)

Some things that scare us are completely supernatural, even unreal, like demons, ghosts, and the rest of the entities. Their mechanics works on mythological archetypes and symbolic potency. The others, like physical and psychological conditions, are not just completely natural and real, but also quite likely to hit us, and the horror comes from that clear relatability. In Mattias Johansson Skoglund’s sophomore feature (and his first solo work as a feature film director) we get both types of horror in a very elegant package. Fresh from the premiere at SXSW, it was screened at Haapsalu.

Small town retiree Monika (Anki Lidén) has fallen at home and suffered a stroke. Exhibiting signs of dementia, she is not able to live on her own any more. Enter her younger son Joel (Philip Oros), a not-so-successful musician based in Stockholm who takes on the tasks of putting her in a nursing home and preparing the house for sale. With the local nursing facility specialising in taking care of elderly patients with special needs, they seem to be in luck, since Joel’s best friend from school, Nina (Gizlem Erdogan) works there as the head nurse and the right hand to the somewhat cordially cold director Elizabeth (Malin Levanon).

But it seems that Monika’s stroke also invoked the spirit of her late husband and Joel’s father Bengt (Peter Jankert) with whom both had a very abusive and traumatic past. They were both on the receiving end of Bengt’s anger, Joel for being gay and interested in experimenting with booze and drugs, and Monika for “enabling” it. To make things worse, Monika now also serves as the medium of sorts for her late husband, and Bengt is ready to unleash his anger on everybody: his family members, Monika’s fellow patients and the nursing home employees as well. Can he be stopped and how much sacrifice would it demand?

Truth to be told, the script written by Skoglund and Mats Strandberg juggles with a lot of data and emotions, and thus it, in a way, forces the director to overplay his hand towards the end in order to try to wrap everything up. The action-packed finale seems somewhat out of place in an otherwise toned-down, subtle and almost minimalist horror-drama that plays out as a piece of lived-in realism, but it is at least executed gracefully. The craft components such as the ambient score and the acting, especially by Oros in the leading role – a John Cusack lookalike who shows his trademark versatility – also help a lot.

However, the real candy is the omnipresent densely uncomfortable atmosphere that comes on top of the richly detailed observations and conclusions in the film's lower layers. Dementia is hell, but it is even greater hell to “share” it with other senile patients. Being locked up in a nursing home is also a hellish experience, but only slightly worse than being imprisoned in the “open” jail of a small town where everybody’s “glory days” seem to be long gone, but remembered. While the people are locked up in their mindsets, the only thing they can do is to repeat the patterns of the past that usually come down to bullying or being bullied. And one’s pain of growing up as the “less loved” son is comparable with the mother’s pain that the “favourite” son shows no care or will to get involved. In the end, (The) Home is where the pain lives.

Reviewed on: 12 May 2025

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