Holly (Aisling Loftus) has recently married the older Richard (Tom Goodman-Hill) but she has not, to this point, met his family. She knows he was married before, and has had three children with his ex-wife, but beyond that she is in the dark, so this weekend coming up should be an eye-opener for her as they are driving out to his former country home to meet the family. It is the birthday of the youngest daughter, so while she sits in the passenger side Holly wraps a present for her: if this doesn't get her into the girl's good books, then what will? How about some profiteroles that she has made for the kids? She really wants to try hard to make a good impression. But what impression will they have on her?
A relatively restrained horror from director Sebastian Godwin, here helming his first feature after a few shorts, it was appropriate it was produced by a television corporation (among other backers) because it did come across as hailing from that hauntology era of the nineteen-seventies, and also at just over an hour long it would slot into the TV schedules very neatly. Whether it was something to tempt moviegoers away from their sofas to visit the cinema for such a brief experience was a different matter, but if you stumbled across it on a streaming service and wanted a quick fix of drama before bed, and macabre drama at that, then it would be just the ticket. But that televisual quality proved to be a double-edged sword.
For a start, it meant they didn't get too explicit about what was actually going on, which in one way was a blessing if you liked a film that sustained its mysteries past the end credits, but in another way, if you were a horror fan who simply wanted to see someone get their head caved in with a spade, then Godwin was not going to oblige you. Either that or he didn't have the budget to oblige you, and the occasional blood spatter was all he could muster for when events grew grimmer. There was another drawback if you liked the suspense angle, in that there wasn't any, you could tell from the beginning that Holly was heading into some form of doom and nothing in the story surprised you, leaving a somewhat sadistic trip into meeting Richard's three horrible children where we were awaiting their eventual actions that revealed themselves as devil's offspring, not little angels.
Essentially a rehash of the seventies paperback bestseller Let's Go Play at the Adams', where some angelic-seeming kids act like monsters in private, as were many of the evil kids subgenre, though not many went as far as that book did, presumably for reasons of censorship and what you could get away with on the big screen. To be fair, there is some wavering where we have cause to wonder whether Richard is the actual monster, even as we question whether the ex-wife is still in the vicinity (she appears to have left in a fit of pique before the couple arrived) or indeed still alive. Though we only wonder that when her strange absence is growing more pressing for the plot, and she may be closer than Holly thinks. There was a degree of Richard having to act too clueless to be believable, though Loftus had the pained social etiquette tone down very nicely, as Holly is unsure whether she should admonish the kids for bad behaviour, lest she be typed as the wicked stepmother. Overall, more of a lightly satisfying throwback that did a lot with very little than a main course of a movie, but given the food in this, maybe not so bad. Choppy strings by Jeremy Warmsley.
[Blue Finch Film Releasing presents Homebound in cinemas 1 April and on digital 4 April 2022.]
