Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of The Home.
As a horror devotee, I’ve seen my fair share of gonzo endings. Brutal, blood-soaked, baffling — all par for the course. But every once in a while, a film comes along with a climax so squelchy and perverse that I can’t stop thinking about it. Such is the case with The Home, the latest directorial effort from Purge creator James DeMonaco. For much of its run time, the Pete Davidson–led thriller about vaguely bad things happening at a retirement home feels like standard gerontophobic fare. In the last 20 minutes, however, the film zigs where I thought it would zag, and I found myself admiring its audacity. Even as I struggle with the overall worth of The Home, I am undeniably taken with its ending, which I have described in detail to friends and loved ones out of an inexplicable compulsion to pass it on.
In The Home, Davidson plays Max, a troubled young man haunted by the death of his foster brother, Luke, when Max was a kid. After a run-in with the law, Max’s foster parents Sylvia (Jessica Hecht) and Couper (Victor Williams) help him avoid jail time with a stint doing janitorial work at Green Meadows. Almost immediately, Max makes some unsettling discoveries: a resident having sex while wearing a Strangers-esque baby-doll mask, a woman whose head starts bleeding profusely during water aerobics, and screams emanating from the forbidden fourth floor. When Max ventures upstairs to investigate, he finds residents who are catatonic, drooling, and crying blood. An old man in a wheelchair points and screams at him before trying to attack. It doesn’t take a sharp mind to deduce that there’s something very wrong with this place, a point that’s underlined when a kindly resident named Norma (Mary Beth Peil) warns Max, “There’s something very wrong with this place.” But soon after Norma urges Max to get away, she appears to jump from a window to her death, impaling herself on the iron gate below.
What follows is the steady reveal of a conspiracy plot that — for reasons that will soon become apparent — does not actually matter at all. Max finds a blacklight in his room with a message to “FIND THE MARKED ONES,” pointing him to residents with an “X” on their necks. He discovers Norma’s journal, which includes the haunting line, “They come at night with their needles and their dogs, changing us, too.” Could that be why Max’s other resident friend Lou (John Glover) keeps having episodes, including pulling out his own teeth? Max receives cryptic messages from a woman on the Faceless Fantasies fetish site. She later shows up in his room, explaining that the government funds Green Meadows and other facilities like it, using residents as guinea pigs for new drugs and treatments. That seems to line up with the research Max has done into Green Meadows’ Dr. Sabian (Bruce Altman), who was ostracized from the medical community over a controversial eye therapy. If you think you know where this is going, however, I can assure you that you’re on the wrong track. Trying to put all the conspiracy pieces together turns out to be a pointless exercise.
Through all of this, Max appears to be getting weaker. He hasn’t been sleeping well, tormented by nightmares of Dr. Sabian performing medical procedures on him and Luke screaming for help. When he flees to his home, it’s to rest and regroup, but an offhand comment by Sylvia makes it clear she knows more than she’s letting on. Once she leaves, Max investigates and stumbles on a hidden room in the house with an altar to Dea, the Roman goddess of youth. (The actual Roman goddess of youth is Juventas, and “dea” is simply the word for “goddess,” but The Home has little interest in these details, so Dea the goddess it is.) There are also photo albums dating back decades that show his foster parents partying with Dr. Sabian, the Green Meadows staff, Norma, Lou, and the rest of the residents. None of them ever age or change in appearance, but at the center of every party photo is a different young person in a wheelchair — including, most troublingly, Luke. Max has a sudden revelation. He heads back to the retirement home and breaks onto the fourth floor, because he’s finally put together that the old man in the wheelchair was trying to get Max’s attention for a reason: He’s Luke. All of the residents on the fourth floor are the young people from the party photos, who have somehow been transformed into barely conscious centenarians. Wait, it gets crazier.
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Before the foster brothers can have a proper reunion, Max is drugged by Green Meadows staffer Les (Adam Cantor, also the co-writer of this movie!). When he wakes up, he’s strapped into a wheelchair at the party from the photo albums. Everyone is there, minus Norma, who genuinely wanted to protect Max and was killed because of it. Lou proceeds to reveal that everything we’ve seen up to that point … was bullshit. “The marks on our necks, the government conspiracy, Faceless Fantasies, my psychoses, all part of the grand tale we concocted to fuck with you for our entertainment while you nourished us at night,” Lou shares. “We did it for fun!”
You could be frustrated that The Home has wasted over an hour of your time on nonsense, or you can appreciate the bold “fuck you” to its audience. Besides, what’s actually going on is much more fun than a government conspiracy. Dr. Sabian explains that there’s a small sac behind a person’s right eye that contains Dea’s nectar and is the source of youth and vitality. They’ve been draining Max nightly and drinking his eye juice, as they’ve been doing to their chosen Green Meadows volunteers since the last century. Toying with Max and their previous victims is a way for this Dea cult to stave off boredom at their very advanced ages. (Max’s foster parents are 109. Lou is 128!) Tonight, they’re going to take even more of Dea’s nectar from Max, enough to make him feel like a 100-year-old man. We see Sabian stick a needle in Max’s eye and drain him, as the cult members surrounding him start to have an orgy because Dea’s nectar also makes them really horny. Yet The Home somehow gets wilder from here.
When Max wakes up on the fourth floor, he’s bleary-eyed and barely conscious. He can see just enough to witness Luke take a spoke from his wheelchair and jab it into another resident’s eye, coaxing her head forward so that her eye goop drips into a cup Luke holds under her. Luke proceeds to stab the eyes of every fourth-floor resident and finally his own, collecting the eye juice until he has a full cup of Dea’s nectar. He then forces Max to drink the whole thing. When I saw Max’s pupils dilate, I nearly clapped in delight. Yes, he is now some sort of Dea-powered superhero, and he’s intent on revenge. He grabs a hammer and an ax and proceeds to maim and murder every single cult member in Green Meadows. The last ten minutes of The Home feature Pete Davidson covered in blood and hacking a bunch of old people to bits. It is all so relentless and cartoonishly violent — chopped-off hands, bones sticking through arms, castration by hammer — that you may find yourself laughing. I don’t know if that’s the reaction DeMonaco was going for, but the explosion of over-the-top gore is so sudden and unearned that I’m not sure how else to respond. This is a supremely silly movie, and it just works better in its final moments, embracing chaos over coherence.
Believe it or not, there is a method to this madness. As Max concludes his rampage, he tells a dying Lou, “I’m taking it all back.” The next shot we see is Max and the other fourth-floor residents walking out of Green Meadows, presumably having sucked out the eye juice from the dead Dea cult members littering the facility. The whole thing is a metaphor for the rage the younger generation feels over what’s been taken from them by boomers and the world they’ve been left with, hinted at by dismissals of climate change as a hoax earlier in the film. DeMonaco spells out his theme in The Home’s production notes. “It was an allegory for climate change — about the previous generation kind of taking everything away from this generation,” he explains. And sure, I see it. There’s certainly something cathartic about Max’s anger, even if the particulars are more gruesome than most of us could stomach. Whether or not the solidly Gen-X DeMonaco is the person to be telling this story, he’s tapping into a very real and urgent resentment.
Ultimately, though, I’m just not convinced this movie’s out-there ending leaves viewers with much to chew on. However noble The Home’s intentions, allegory can’t hope to compete with frenetic carnage. When you’ve just watched Pete Davidson chug eye juice and slaughter senior citizens, the climate crisis is the last thing on your mind.
