If THE HOME (2025) Were Submitted for Coverage

It's about that time of the year where I start screening work for some film festivals.

I figured what better way to begin this screening season than by forcing myself to watch a bad movie and write a review?

Since I'll be doing exactly that over 100 times for the next several weeks 😌

And I found the absolute perfect film to kick things off: THE HOME.

A straight horror film.

Starring Pete Davidson.

With no (intentional) comedy.

And if that doesn't sound appealing to you, you don't belong in the True Bad Movie Lovers Club 😎

if that does sound appealing to you, let's go watch all the bad movies together hehe

Click HERE to jump to the coverage!

It's very easy to convince me to watch a bad movie. Probably easier than it is to convince me to watch a good one.

Because when I'm watching any movie, I'm constantly analyzing the story instead of just enjoying it.

I even find it difficult to turn my brain off and fully enjoy my favorite movies of all time (The Matrix, Face/Off, Rocky Horror Picture Show!!!)

But when I'm watching a truly BAD movie -- one that never had the chance to be good? That's when I can relax.

I never posted about this even though I couldn't stop gushing about it to everyone I know, but the best in-theatre experience I've ever had was while watching HURRY UP TOMORROW.

and i'll watch that movie as many times as i can force my friends to watch it hehe 🤭

That movie was so mind-bogglingly bad, it was actually brilliant.

And I need The Weekend to make a movie in every genre ASAP.

Better yet, I need him to take over the film industry.

With NO outside influence!!!!

It's hard to compete with that movie, in terms of making a worse one.

But THE HOME (2025) got pretty close.

Having a fever while watching THE HOME should be required for the viewing experience, because I honestly think it enhanced mine.

The movie is like a fever dream anyway, so really feeling that in your body is like a 4d experience you never thought possible.

Unfortunately I was too exhausted to write notes and a synopsis during the movie, but I think my post-fever recollection of the plot is as accurate as it's gonna get.

I've written out my coverage the same way I do when I screen films for festivals. If you're curious about what goes on behind the scenes, or want to know what a screener is judging your film on, this will give you some insight!

As you'll see, the language is more casual, because my notes will never be seen by the filmmakers.

Only the senior programmers look at my notes.

And they'll really only see my notes if I rate the film 3/5 or above, or if the film is otherwise notable.

In this case, I rated it a 1/5.

When that happens, I can get a little wild with my feedback because I know probably no one's gonna read it (but if they do, they'll have some fun 💅).

And the film's already complete so there's not much anyone can really do!

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COVERAGE REPORT: THE HOME (2025)

Rating:

1/5

Synopsis (condensed):

When rebellious MAX is sentenced to community service at a retirement home, he quickly realizes something sinister is happening behind closed doors. As Max uncovers disturbing clues and witnesses horrifying events, he learns the home is a front for a cult of immortality-obsessed elders who consume eye fluid from young victims to stay "youthful." Before Max becomes their next victim, he kills everyone involved with an axe, then frees the home’s imprisoned patients being drained of their lives.

Synopsis (from beginning to end):

When MAX is caught spraying graffiti, he's taken to the police station, where his father (the police chief?) lets him off easy -- instead of being arrested, Max will do community service work at a local retirement home. Upon arrival, Max is told by his supervisors what he can and can't do: clean up the building, and never go on the 4th floor. His first day is off to a rough start when he walks in on (and stays far too long to watch) two of the patients having sex while wearing creepy masks. Things become crazier when, while cleaning up near the pool, a woman's head starts suddenly gushing blood.

The next day, his supervisors plan a party for him to make up for his terrible first day. At the party, he talks with NORMA, who says he reminds her of someone she once knew. When Max is awoken by piercing screams later that night, he goes to the 4th floor where he believes the sound is coming from. There, he finds various sickly old people in wheelchairs, listening to an educational TV program about oil companies. He approaches one of the patients, who attacks him. Max's supervisors have to break them up, and they warn Max to never come up here again.

Max has nightmares the next day and can't sleep. He decides to talk with Norma, and they bond over the fact they both lost a loved one (her son, his brother). Feeling closer to her, Max tells her about his experience on the 4th floor. Norma tells him "a heart knows a heart," which is why he cares so much about those patients, but that there's nothing he can do about it, and he needs to let it go.

Over the next few days, Max witnesses various other odd occurrences. He finds secret messages written on the walls, the in-house doctor seemingly torturing patients, multiple patients harming themselves to the point of drawing blood, etc. When he talks to Norma about this, she tells him there's something very wrong with this place and that he needs to leave. She refuses to say more, and the next day, she falls out the window to her death, in a supposed suicide. Not believing this, Max searches through her belongings in the basement, finding her journal where she writes about people being taken in the night. To remember her by, Max takes a small wooden trinket she loved.

Desperate for answers, Max searches online and finds that the in-house doctor was shunned in recent years for his dangerous medical experiments on elderly people. A pop-up on his computer leads him to a creepy livestream where a woman with a deformed face tells him he needs to help her help the patients. The next day, the woman comes to his room and confirms what he's learned so far -- the patients are being tortured at night. Max sets up hidden cameras around the facility to capture what goes on at night, and when he's seen enough, he decides to go try to stop the doctor himself. Before he can, he's tackled by the same patient who attacked him the other day, who somehow got loose from the 4th floor. He hits his head on the ground and falls unconscious.

Max wakes up in the medical exam room, quickly escaping before the doctor arrives. He calls for his parents to pick him up, and when they take him home, his mother tells him "a heart knows a heart," but she can't remember who she heard that saying from. Finding this odd, he searches the house for any clues that his mother knew Norma, but finds nothing. Later, Max's new foster sisters ask where he got the wooden trinket he's carrying. They tell him it's exactly like the one from "the secret room," where Max finds various identical wooden trinkets, and most notably a photobook of his parents and all the nursing home patients and staff over the years, all looking the exact same age, standing in front of a different young child strapped to a wheelchair in each picture. In one photo, he sees his brother, who he was told died by suicide when he was younger.

Max brings the photobook to the nursing home's 4th floor and shows it to the patients, who all confirm they are the kids that were in the wheelchairs. Just then, Max is stabbed in the neck with a syringe by the doctor, and he falls unconscious. He wakes up strapped to a wheelchair in the middle of a party for all the nursing home patients and staff. One of the patients, LEO, congratulates everyone on "playing their parts so well." He reveals that everything that's happened so far was just them "playing with their food." The doctor explains that they drain fluid from the back of young people's eyes and drink it, which helps them live forever. Most of the people in the room are over 100 years old, though they don't appear to be. They drain Max's eye, and he wakes up later on the 4th floor, barely able to move.

Max's brother drains the fluid from all the other 4th floor patients' eyes and feeds it to Max, giving him the strength to get up and kill everyone involved in the conspiracy, including his parents, with an axe. Once they're all dead, he frees the 4th floor patients, and they head outside to feel the sunlight for the first time in presumably many years.

Notable elements:

Pete Davidson stars in and EP'd this film, which was written and directed by James DeMonaco (THE PURGE franchise)

Filmmaking:

Despite the crew of professionals, this film ultimately resembles what could be described as a "pretty good student film."

Aside from the painful acting, the cinematography and editing was wildly poor quality for a film with a budget this high. It wasn't an equipment problem -- it was a technique problem. Jittery and oddly framed shots often completely covered or obscured the focal point. Multiple scenes clearly had little coverage, which resulted in choppy and discontinuous editing that even someone who knows nothing about filmmaking would notice.

Overall, it's shoddy filmmaking paired with a cast of actors who likely had no more idea what was going on than the audience does.

Story:

If it was all just to get to the film's final scenes where Pete Davidson kills everyone with an axe... It still wasn't worth it.

For a majority of the film, we're given several "hints" as to what the nursing home's dark secret actually is, but none of them connect to each other or even end up being real. First we're led to believe the nursing home is some crazy sex cult, then that there's unethical human experimentation going on behind closed doors, then that people are being held captive and some even killed for unknown reasons (unrelated to the medical experiments), and mixed up in all of that there's also random guards with dogs roaming the halls at night, wooden trinkets that are somehow tied to a larger conspiracy, patients regularly inflicting intense self-harm, and a creepy livestream of a woman trapped in a basement who wants to help Max save everyone...?

The only way any of it makes sense is that it's all just a story someone wrote -- which is exactly what the final twist is revealed to be! In the final few scenes, patient LOU reveals that they were all "just messing" with Max (and the audience, by proxy). It may as well have ended with "it was all a dream," which actually happens at various points throughout the film and wouldn't have been that surprising.

It may have even been a better ending.

The film's biggest crime isn't even that there's no emotional journey or clear arc the protagonist experiences (Sure, he saves his brother who he thought was dead. But do we care? No. The story focused so little on any actual character development that this resolution fell completely flat) -- that could have all been forgiven had the plot been well-crafted otherwise.

The worst part is that the final twist is just kinda dropped on us with no further explanation, when we DEFINITELY needed some explanation. Like, why would all these people decide to be OLD forever? They certainly wouldn't choose that had they been introduced to this cult at a younger age -- which begs the question: how did this cult come to be? Was it just a regular nursing home people went to, then found out what it really was? And how did Max's parents get involved, especially when they're nowhere near nursing home age?

And, though it's revealed pretty much everything we saw throughout the film was "a joke," it still doesn't explain how the patients were able to pull their own teeth out, cut their hands open, and otherwise seriously injure themselves without any real consequence.

Or what, was that all special effects? Was it just a movie all along?! Was Max really Pete Davidson this whole time??? 😱

Overall, the story is poorly constructed with multiple cop-outs, no true pay-off, and far less sex than the first 20 minutes would lead one to believe. Had the plot stuck in one lane instead of trying to incorporate several disconnected twists, there could have been potential for a decent horror film. Instead, the result is a confusing mess of cheap jumpscares and red herrings.

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And there you have it!

Maybe in my next blog post, I'll do this for a decent movie, so y'all can see the sort of feedback I give when I know people are gonna read it 👀

But for now, this is what you get hehe

Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!