Crew
Director – James DeMonaco, Screenplay – Adam Cantor & James DeMonaco, Producers – Bill Block & Sebastien K. LeMercier, Photography – Anastas Michor, Music – Nathan Whitehead, Visual Effects – Stargate Studios (Supervisor – Jonathan Caruana & Dmitry Kovalev), Special Effects Supervisor – Eugene Hitt, Prosthetic Makeup – Designs to Deceive, Production Design – Marl Lena Colston. Production Company – Miramax/Man in a Tree.
Cast
Pete Davidson (Max), John Glover (Lou), Bruce Altman (Dr Sabian), Mary Beth Peil (Norma), Adam Cantor (Les), Mugga (Juno), Stuart Rudin (Screaming Man), Ethan Phillips (Ethan), Victor Williams (Couper), Jessia Hecht (Sylvia), Denise Burse (Sadie), Nathalie Schmidt (Ellie)
Plot
Max is arrested after gratifying a building. His foster father intervenes to prevent Max going to jail by getting him diverted to work as a live-in janitor at the Green Meadows Retirement Home. Max settles in but soon finds that sinister things are occurring around the facility, including patients being kept in a severely vegetative state on the fourth floor. He is given mysterious warnings about marked inmates and finds an ultraviolet light mark on the backs of their necks. An elderly woman who warns him to leave is then killed in what seems to be a suspicious suicide.
James DeMonaco is the creator of The Purge films and directed the first three entries in the series with The Purge (2013), The Purge: Anarchy (2014) and The Purge: Election Year (2016). Aside from that, DeMonaco has also directed the earlier Staten Island (2009) and This is the Night (2021), both non-genre works about growing up in Staten Island. He had earlier worked as a screenwriter for films like Jack (1996), The Negotiator (1998), Assault on Precinct 13 (2005) and Skinwalkers (2006).
The retirement home has occasionally served as the basis of a horror film with the likes of Next of Kin (1982) and The Manor (2021). The Home comes out sixteen months after the much superior retirement home horror The Rule of Jenny Pen (2024).
James DeMonaco loves social realism in his films – but it is also faux social realism. Here Pete Davidson is shown as a decent guy who has just fallen on the wrong side of the tracks. At the start of the film, he is arrested and we are told being given his one big chance otherwise – it is underlined in big serious portentous messaging – he will go to jail. The big crime he is accused of – murder? drug-dealing? burglary? Grievous Bodily Harm? None of the above – he was caught graffitiing the side of a building. When a film so laughably fumbles its big meaningful rock-bottom moment for its hero, how can you take anything that proceeds after that point seriously?
The arrival at the retirement home is no better. It seems here that DeMonaco’s only tool in terms of horror is to keep shoving the grotesquerie of aging in an audience’s face – pee, poo, Pete Davidson looking in on old people having sex, those in a vegetative state drooling, an old lady starting to bleed in an exercise pool, people with lesions on their faces, long uncut yellowing nails and the like. It is a normal and sometimes ugly part of aging but it seems to be treading a dubious line turning this into shock effect.
In between that DeMonaco gives us annoying dream jumps with people in gimp masks or the absurdity of scenes with the elderly trying to strangle Pete Davidson with their intestines. DeMonaco even tries to turn the discovery of an anatomical dummy in a closet into a shock effect. All of which adds up to a film that is loudly demonstrating that it has an empty arsenal in terms of real horror. It can be said that James DeMonaco has become a director who has risen to his level of incompetence by having an accidental hit – in this case The Purge – and then is stuck floundering about trying to repeat that without a clue about what he is doing.
What killed The Home for me was the way that it builds up a mystery about ultraviolet marks on the backs of patient’s necks, sinister happenings, John Glover having a seizure – only for all of that to then be dismissed by John Glover telling Pete Davidson “We were fucking with you to have some fun.” It is one of the most cynical twists one has ever come across in a film – the false engagement in mystery and suspense and then the throwing it away by us being told that it doesn’t matter, it was just a prank on the main character. In fact, what we have is a film that has outright contempt for its audience for even engaging with it.
The film does reach an entertaining climax where [PLOT SPOILERS] Pete Davidson wanders through the facility conducting a bloodbath and slaughtering all of the inhabitants, before leading those in the veggie ward out to safety. While entertaining, you cannot help but wonder in exactly world we exist where Pete would not likely be arrested by police within a fairly quick space of time? Or even what exactly it is that he intends to do now that he is unemployed and has just walked out of the home where he lived and taken charge of a dozen or more elderly in an advanced state of inability to look after themselves.
(Winner in this site’s Worst Films of 2025 list).
Trailer here