Growing up is the real nightmare in Pete Davidson’s schlocky horror show

THE HOME ★★½

(R) 97 minutes.

Horror movies tend to be aimed at young people, so it makes sense that an entire subgenre has sprung up focused on the ickiness of getting old (even The Substance has some of this, though the message is supposed to be the opposite).

The senior citizens in these films may be villains or victims, but either way, they’re presented as physically repulsive: feeble-minded, shrivelled up and falling apart. Effectively, they’re living corpses – and should they possess any sort of vestigial sex drive, we’re invited to view this as the worst horror of all.

James DeMonaco’s crude, though not wholly ineffective, The Home starts out straightforwardly in this dubious vein – and never entirely veers off course, although DeMonaco, best known for the similarly grisly Purge films, has a couple of surprises in store if we haven’t seen the spoiler-heavy trailer.

Squarely in the Generation X demographic, DeMonaco is no newly hatched prodigy. Neither is the film’s star Pete Davidson, who spent most of his 20s on Saturday Night Live.

Still, at 30 or thereabouts, Davidson retains his lumbering adolescent sullenness as Max, a Staten Island graffiti artist sentenced to four months of community service as caretaker of the isolated Green Meadow retirement home, an oppressive brick fortress with shadowy corridors and officious staff.

Decay is omnipresent, even setting aside whatever might be happening on the fourth floor, officially off-limits where Max is concerned. Small wonder he has recurring nightmares, some of them linked to the loss of his beloved older foster brother Luke (Matthew Miniero), a trauma dating to childhood.

“There’s something very wrong with this place,” confides Norma, one of the more vivacious residents, who takes a special shine to Max, whether because he recalls her lost son or for other reasons (her name appears to derive from Norma Desmond, the ageing but flirtatious silent movie queen in Sunset Boulevard, in which Max was the butler).

But is there really a conspiracy afoot, as the anonymous messages Max starts getting on his computer seem to be hinting? Or as another resident, Lou (John Glover), proposes, is the real horror simply the mundane battle to fend off boredom while awaiting death?

Ambiguity is not DeMonaco’s strong suit: The Home, like The Purge, has a heavy-handed satirical side, though this can’t be addressed without spoilers. Still, in his schlocky way he does aim here for a woozy, hallucinatory mood, relying heavily on screechy sound design and slow dissolves.

There’s room to wonder if the story is one big nightmare on Max’s part, expressing his reluctance to grow up – and conceivably fuelled by pilfered medication prescribed for the residents of Green Meadow by Dr Sabian (Bruce Altman).

Again, to say more would reveal too much. But beyond DeMonaco’s willingness to go for broke with gore, this sense of not entirely knowing where we stand gives the climax of The Home what edge it has.

The Home is released in cinemas on August 14.

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