Nerdly » Frightfest 2023: ‘Home Sweet Home

28th Aug2023

Frightfest 2023: ‘Home Sweet Home – Where Evil Lives’ Review

by Alain Elliott

Stars: Nilam Farooq, David Kross, Justus von Dohnányi | Written and Directed by Thomas Sieben

I do have a pretty poor reason for wanting to watch Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives. At least initially anyway because the reason being is that it holds the same title (Home Sweet Home) as the first book I wrote and released. Obviously, I then had a quick read of the synopsis and discovered that this a film that is shot in one-shot, real-time, and I got even more excited.

It’s not featured a whole lot in the genre but I love films that are shot with one shot. It seems like an incredibly difficult thing to achieve and it always impresses me. The script (and obviously the performances) have to be near perfect. Silent House and the exceptional One Cut of the Dead, have proved that it can absolutely work in horror.

In Home Sweet Home, the heavily pregnant Maria arrives alone at her fiancées rural family estate but soon starts to hear noises, seeing possible prowlers and the electricity keeps switching off! But it gets much worse as she discovers a secret room that unveils a dark family secret and she desperately wants to leave the haunted house. It’s never that easy though, is it?!

The filmmakers of Home Sweet Home do really well to use the way it is shot to create the scares. There are some really clever shots of ‘people’ appearing from nowhere – a light switch goes on and off to reveal a figure or the camera will pan down to a fallen object and when it moves back up the figure you saw is gone. It’s an intelligent way to use this ‘gimmick’ in a horror movie and it works very well. A film like One Cut of the Dead had fun and used practical effects for comedy but Home Sweet Home aims for bigger things. And despite a small budget and the difficulty of doing anything ‘big’, it still has some really cool moments that I was not expecting. These moments are all linked to the back story which covers the German colonial history of the Herero genocide in 1904.

Nilam Farooq is fantastic as Maria. She is alone for a big chunk of the movie but she excels with this. It’s a much-needed performance because she is the focus of so much of the movie. With the camera often making you feel like you are there alongside her, you feel every jump or moment of tension. Once she has other actors to work off of, the performance somehow gets even better and you’ll be glued to the screen when the tension builds for that final third.

There’s much to enjoy with Home Sweet Home. The use of the real-time one-shot setting only makes things scarier and you wont see many better uses of the movie technique. Those lucky enough to have seen its World Première at this year’s Frightfest will be very impressed.