Movie Review: THE HOME

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: July 25th, 2025 / 12:37 PM

Rating: R
Stars: Pete Davidson, John Glover, Bruce Altman, Mary Beth Peil, Jessica Hecht, Victor Williams, Mugga, Ethan Phillips, Adam Cantor, Matthew Miniero, Jagger Nelson, Marilee Talkington
Writers: James DeMonaco & Adam Cantor
Director: James DeMonaco
Distributor: Roadside Attractions/Lionsgate/Miramax
Release Date: July 25, 2025

Writer/director James DeMonaco is probably best known for creating THE PURGE franchise. While his new film THE HOME, co-written with Adam Cantor, is significantly different in many ways, it shares with THE PURGE a certain philosophy about how privilege can easily lead to predation.

We meet Luke (Matthew Miniero) and his eleven-year-old brother Max (Jagger Nelson) celebrating Luke’s imminent departure for college with their foster parents, Sylvia (Jessica Hecht) and Couper (Victor Williams). Max is sad that Luke is leaving, but Luke promises he’ll always be there for Max.

But as it turns out, Luke isn’t. The now-adult Max (Pete Davidson) can’t seem to stay out of trouble, even though his misdeeds are victimless crimes like graffiti (“our future is burning” reads one artful tag).

Faced with a choice between jail and the community service job Couper has arranged for him, Max chooses the latter. He becomes the new live-in custodian at the Green Meadows Retirement Home.

As such places go, Green Meadows is extremely clean and well-run. Residents have their own spacious and well-decorated rooms and there’s plenty of brain-stimulating activity, with painting and acting classes and swimming.

Lou (John Glover), a former actor and leader among the occupants, tells Max that he believes what kills elderly people isn’t disease but boredom. Max is impressed at how Lou cheers up his peers. At the same time, Max is befriended by Norma (Mary Beth Peil), who sees in him something of her deceased son.

Dr. Sabian (Bruce Altman), head nurse Juno (Mugga) and chief orderly Les (co-writer Cantor) lay out the rules for Max, which are mainly to stay out of the basement and not to go onto the fourth floor, where the fragile patients live.

Max being Max, it doesn’t take long for a mixture of curiosity and concern to have him looking around. What he finds, plus an inability to sleep and some very strange nightmares, lead him to believe there’s something wrong with this place.

There wouldn’t be a movie if Max was wrong about this, although neither he nor we immediately guess what it is. The screenplay plays fair and square with us – by the end, things that might have seen like coincidences or plot oversights add up.

To be clear, THE HOME is not in the same subgenre as, say, THE RULE OF JENNY PEN. They’re both horror movies set in facilities for elderly residents, but THE HOME doesn’t derive its dread from realistic recreation of misery and incapacity.

There is discussion of this, but THE HOME is instead a steadily thrumming thriller where the protagonist is scratching away at a seemingly benign surface to find something monstrous beneath.

It should be added that while the first two acts are moderately sedate, punctuated by some jumps and a bit of grisly imagery, the third act packs in enough bloodshed for an entire PURGE movie.

Davidson is ideal as the wary, rebellious yet compassionate Max. Glover’s theatricality and Peil’s flickering warmth have just the right kind of nuance, and Mugga is especially good as the hard-to-read Nurse Juno.

It’s possible to compare THE HOME to other specific films, but that would give the game away. DeMonaco maintains a sense of constricting creepiness throughout, culminating in a proper blowout.

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