FrightFest review – Home Sweet Home – Wo das Böse wohnt (Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives)
By now – after two versions of Silent House, for instance – the single-take horror film isn’t an innovation but a convention. Writer-director Thomas Sieben’s impressive nightmare is too fast-paced to encourage nit-pickers to spot blurry moments where there might or might not be edits and handles with ease several challenges of the form. Characters video-call the protagonist, the movie is set in the hour and a half where night falls, the realtime scenario is expanded to include historical flashbacks (!), the look-out-behind-you shadowy figure in the hallway stalker expected in these things is one-upped with actual optical effects ghosts, and lead Nilam Farooq plays a heavily-pregnant woman who has a massive character arc from happy housewife (in an isolated mansion with a possible colonial curse on it) through haunted detective heroine to shrieking paranoid beset by supernatural and human evil which, as the title suggests, is coming from inside the home.
Sieben, who made one of the fifteen or so films called Prey made in the last few years, marshals resources well and the camera runs at a fair old lick behind Maria (Farooq) for most of the film. One-take films always have an element of suspense, as the audience knows (even subliminally) that even a minor foulup can derail the whole project so everyone has to come back the next night and try again, heightening the sense that everyone is on their toes throughout, buzzing with the project as well as the terrors in the storyline.
Here’s the FrightFest listing.
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