Sometimes I think that you hear the word horror and you expect a certain kind of movie, especially when ghosts are mentioned alongside it. Over the years there has been an ever increasing prevalence of ghost themed horror films that have used jump scares, loud noises, and ghastly figures appearing out of the dark to frighten the viewer. But before this ghost stories would often rely on atmosphere, on using the sense of the unnerving to leave people feeling uncomfortable, if not outright frightened. This is the kind of approach that Come Home uses, and tells a much quieter kind of horror story.
Come Home tells the story of two New York couples, Ike (Chinaza Uche) and Mel (Caitlin Zoz), and Arjun (Sathya Sridharan) and Taylor (Paton Ashbrook), who travel into the Adriondack
Mountains to get away from things for a bit. Mel's family have a cabin up on a lake out in the woods, so the two couples head up to spend time in the quiet of nature. However, Mel tells the group a story around their campfire about a woman many years ago, who fell in love with someone from outside the community. When he vanished in the woods she waited for him to return, eventually vanishing herself. Now it's said that her spirit haunts the area.
The others laugh off the story, believing it to be nothing but local superstition, but when strange things begin to happen around them, and one of the group vanishes in the middle of the night, they can't deny that there's something otherworldly happening at the lake, and that it's set its sights on the four of them.
Come Home is a fairly short film, sitting at just over an hour long, and as such it doesn't spend too long in getting into its story. The film skips long introductions and gets into things pretty quickly, and I found it to be a decision that's something of a mixed bag. On the one hand it cuts to the chase, getting the audience into the setting quickly and introducing the ghost story that's the focus of the film, but on the other there's not a huge connection to the characters. The short length means that there's not a huge number of scenes where we get to know these people before the strange and sinister things begins to happen to them.
The two that we spend the most time with are the men, Ike and Arjun, and we do get a couple of personality traits for them. Ike is the quieter guy whilst Arjun is the talkative one, and Arjun really likes the idea of moving up to the lake permanently. But that's about it. Their partners barely get any kind of personality to them, and they feel the least fleshed out of the movie. Ike makes friends with a local woman, Sam (Audrey Elaine Hailes), and she has more personality than Mel and Taylor put together to the point where she may as well be the third character of the movie.
This is a shame, as Mel and Taylor and what happens to them is an important component of the film, and their lack of development or character does the entire thing a disservice. Some of this might be down to Caitlin Zoz being the film's co-director, and Paton Ashbrook being one of the writers, so the two of them ended up being more involved behind the scenes than in front of the camera, but it does leave their characters feeling the least developed of the film and I found that to be a shame.
Despite these flaws in character development or screen time there's a lot to enjoy about Come Home. The film looks really good for what's a fairly low budget movie. The outdoor environments look great, and the camera spends a lot of time lingering on the expansive shots of nature, just soaking in the beauty of the surroundings. The music is pretty decent too, and matches the scenes well, complimenting what you're seeing. This might seem like simple things to praise, but with so many small productions being let down in both the audio and visuals it's wonderful to see a film like this do them so well.
As far as the plot goes, I did enjoy it. As I mentioned in the introduction, this isn't a more overt horror film. There's no jump scares, and many of the scenes aren't in the least frightening. Instead, the film fits into an uneasy sense of dread, one where you're not quite sure what's going to come next, and you start to question what's going on. To this point, there will likely be a few questions come the end, as the film doesn't outright explain everything, though it does provide a lot of the details in more subtle ways. One of the things that I picked up on was that the film deals with racism and interracial relationships, though I did have to go back and check a small detail in a previous scene to confirm this. There are subtle details and themes here that might be missed by some, and I probably didn't catch them all, but for those willing to be a bit more eagle-eyed and willing to think about the story there's more here than you might first think.
Come Home is a flawed movie, but one that really tries and has some great ideas; and because of that I can't describe it as a bad film. It's trying, it's got a clear idea of the kind of story it wants to tell and is taking some big swings to do so. The film looks great, and with so many horror films throwing monsters at the camera and using jump scares to frighten viewers it's nice to see a more relaxed, perhaps even intellectual approach to the genre.
No comments:
Post a Comment