The Home

When Monika (Anki Lidén) suffers a stroke in her small-town home, her not-so-subtly second-favorite son, Joel (Philip Oros), returns from Stockholm to care for his widowed mother, hoping to help ease the transition to her new life at a local memory-care facility. Soon after settling in, Monika’s confused, unsettled behavior turns abruptly and unpredictably violent, and Joel can’t shake the horrifying suspicion that his abusive late father might have returned from the beyond to torment mother and son anew, not content to leave his beleaguered next of kin in peace. What unfolds is an understated master class in treading the unstable boundary line between allegorical horror and family tragedy, an authentically terrifying yet resolutely compassionate depiction of dementia at its most painful and unsparing. Director Mattias J. Skoglund gives equal emotional weight to the ordeals of parent and child, savvily harnessing the affective power of the genre’s formal conventions to dramatize the terrifying isolation and disorientation that the disease can inflict on both its victims and, indirectly, their loved ones. A Dark Star Pictures release.