This is Our Home is a 2019 thriller about a struggling couple’s weekend getaway that goes awry when a stranger calls upon them.
Cory (Jeff Ayars) and Reina (Simone Policano) are a young couple once greatly in love but now feeling some distance in the wake of a terrible loss. Traveling into the country to her old family home, reconnecting isn’t easy, try as they do. Then, one late night, there arrives at the door a young boy. His name is Zeke (Drew Beckas) and he has a bewildering announcement, that he is in fact, their son.
For the first fifteen minutes of director Omri Dorani‘s disquieting This Is Our Home, you might think it the start of a somewhat standard romance on the rocks story with a generic looking couple dealing with some intimacy issues trying to save whatever’s left of their relationship. It’s got all the trappings of such, and is genuinely effective in convincing us that’s where we’re at.
Yes, there’s a hint that things might not be exactly on par with normality though when they get a flat out on a lonely stretch of road and a pair of would-be atypical backwater loons pull up and have the couple thinking things are going to get bad. So do we, and it becomes a subtle wrinkle in Rob Harmon‘s screenplay that maybe this is not at all going to be about what we expect.
However, once Zeke shows up, This Is Our Home sheds most of its pretense, going full on psychological thriller as Reina and Cory become drawn into separate bouts of madness that sees them abandoning all kinds of logic in the presence of the curiously off-beat boy. And that becomes the larger hurdle in getting through this, where all things inside the walls of the odd house exists in a strange ethereal nightmare.
Truths are revealed in fits of outrage yet soaked in an honest love these troubled people feel (or felt) for each other that leaves much of what we become witness to in a sort of altered sense of reality. What is authentic and what is not, who is there and who is, well, not? A lot of the success in seeing this play out is in Dorani’s calculated direction, a filmmaker who knows well enough what scares an audience yet wraps it all up in a fascinating, and escalating trial of traumatizing terror that tasks us with paying a great deal of attention. There are moments that are truly harrowing, but it’s because they are so heavy with creative intensity in what they mean, it feels less like a conventional horror story and more like an emotional puzzle in figuring out an image that is designed to be lacking a few key pieces. You get the sense that there is not a single wasted shot in the film though, that everything is deeply connected, right down to the smallest detail. It’s a cryptic balancing act that doesn’t play lightly with its symbolism.
While both Ayars and Policano are well cast and convincing, Beckas creates one of the most disturbing little kids in recent memory, Dorani getting quite a bit out of the young talent, capturing a few chilling sequences that really put some weight into this. These pivots in the progression help a lot in rounding out the edges on an emerging theme that eventually plies its way to the surface, where we piece together enough to make shape of our own interpretation. Still, answers won’t come easy, and nor should they, This Is Our Home committed to its ambiguity, maybe so much it might leave many genre fans unsure what to make of it. That’s surely the point, and as such, makes this unique chiller one to watch, the chance to think deeply about a movie rare enough these days that it alone earns this a recommendation.
This Is Our Home releases December 3rd.