Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives (2023) Transgenerational Guilt Haunts this House (Review)

Out now from Blue Finch Films is the rarest of rarities for the modern horror fan, a German genre title – Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives. Aside from the halcyon days of Expressionism and the Euro Horror boom there are only a handful of titles from Germany and Austria like The Nightmare (2015), Hagazussa (2017), Goodnight Mommy (2014), and Mother Superior (2022), that have had any notable international breakthrough. As with any country with a complicated modern history, they understandably don’t tend to dip into horror for reasons that I won’t discuss (just yet), for fear of coming across like a meme of a nationalistic English geezer. On the international market though, tackling themes linked to the World Wars provides fascinating potential for a filmmaker to address marriage into another family.     

Written and directed by Thomas Sieben, Home Sweet Home is a contained chamber horror set in a lush countryside family home. Nilam Farooq is Maria, the pregnant wife of David Kross (Victor), and together they’re moving into an old family home with a plan to turn it into a bed and breakfast, only Victor is busy with a meeting and he can’t get out of work. This leaves Maria, who’s pregnant to the extent that she could go into labour at any moment, alone in a vast, old house with few modern amenities, and electricity that is unpredictable at best. She keeps on hearing mysterious, spooky sounds and, this being a horror movie, goes to investigate what they are. In the basement we discover the dark history this family she’s married into has been harbouring, as well as a ghost who’s wandering the hallways, leaving blood stained scrawlings in its wake. If that wasn’t bad enough, Maria has hallucinations after reading some grim mementos in the basement, and it’s then that her father-in-law doctor, Wilhelm (Justus von Dohnányi), turns up for a temporary reprieve – but his presence eventually adds to Maria’s increasing anxiety.       

Structurally, Home Sweet Home follows the DNA of the “eat the rich” sub-genre, and even though Victor and Wilhelm aren’t really represented as the upper classes usually are in those movies, the traits are shared. It’s also a haunted house movie that follows a single character as spooky things happen around them, and although neither “eat-the-rich” or “haunted house” are particularly innovative, originality is overrated. That may sound like an audaciously stupid comment, but allow me to paraphrase Tarantino, who’s famous for his liberal borrowing from older movies – it’s not where you take things from, it’s how you make them your own, and what things you add to give it a new flavour. 

Even within these parameters I don’t think Home Sweet Home is wholly successful, but the themes do offer something substantial to chew on. I have to apologise for straying into spoilers here, but I can’t really discuss this without explaining the background of the ghost. The Welling family (Wilhelm and Victor), have a family member who carried out atrocious acts in a German campaign in Africa during the War. He came home, lost his mind, and had to be killed because of the extreme the violence he threatened his family with (I’ve avoided key points but I think you can read between the lines). Ignoring the events of the movie, Wilhelm and Victor are innocents, but it seems like Sieben is using Home Sweet Home to talk about their guilt by association. Japanese movies have discussed this sort of transgenerational guilt (i.e. how certain families will forever be guilty of the transgressions of previous generations), with a world leading collection of anti-war movies, and there must be a degree of that present in German society too. Add into that the fact that the leading lady is, according to Wikipedia at least, the daughter of Polish and Pakistani parents – which feels like a conscious casting decision that puts more meat on the bone.       

I say all this, but Home Sweet Home isn’t an anti-war movie – at least, not a traditional one. It’s an otherwise by-the-numbers haunted house horror movie, and Sieben brings to it one-take cinematography. Whether genuine or masking the cuts, cinematographer Daniel Gottschalk presents a handsome movie of perpetual motion that’s functionally a faux-found footage – albeit far better looking and lit more expressively. The problem here is pacing, and this is the core of my concerns as much of the first half of the movie sees Maria either on the phone with someone or wandering around the house saying very little. This is interspersed with some heavily telegraphed and overly orchestrated jump scares, and a ghost pottering around in the background playing with the lights. It does feel more energetic in the second half when more players are introduced, but even at a light eighty minutes it still feels long. The content may not do much for the seasoned horror fan, but the aforementioned subtext and the way it sympathetically presents a pregnant woman is where this movie is most rewarding. 

Rob’s Archive – Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives (2023)