Homebound (2022) Review

Richard (Tom Goodman-Hill) is driving his nervous fiancée Holly (Aisling Loftus) to his place in the countryside in order for her to meet his three children from his previous marriage including Lucia (Hattie Gotobed) whose birthday celebrations are about to take place. However, when the soon-to-be wed couple arrive, the children’s mother is nowhere to be found and Lucia’s siblings Anna (Raffiella Chapman) and Ralph (Lukas Rolfe) are behaving oddly…

A low budget production which relies chiefly on atmosphere rather than effects, writer/director Sebastian Godwin’s Homebound is also a film which makes deliberately odd choices from minute one, setting up a family unit in which very few boundaries appear to exist, such as the alcohol which Anna and Ralph imbibe freely during Lucia’s birthday dinner.

This, combined with the thoroughly unsatisfactory explanation of Richard’s ex-wife fleeing the house rather than dealing with the stress of meeting his future wife, will almost certainly raise the question “Why doesn’t Holly just get the hell out of there?” in the minds of many viewers.

Well, this is a horror movie, and in horror movies folks do not tend to get the hell out of there when they should, including Holly who tries her best to befriend the kids while accepting the side mission of wandering around the building and its grounds trying to piece together whether or not something awful has taken place. Meanwhile, Richard’s patience with his offspring begins to wear thin and it appears to Holly as though he may be far from the ideal father – or perhaps husband – she’d assumed previously.

In any movie featuring a remote, rambling old pile in which things go bump in the night, comparisons are always going to be drawn, generally unfavourably, with The Innocents. Few films are going to spin the same orbit as Jack Clayton’s 1961 masterpiece and to be fair to Homebound it’s aiming in a somewhat different direction with some genuinely odd dialogue that’s both funny peculiar and funny ha ha.

If the set up invites questions about the potential fragility of the plot, it’s the performances regarding the fragility of the featured family which keep Homebound watchable. As the youngest kid, Gotobed is sweet without being annoying, Chapman and Rolfe craft something beyond the expected creepy teen template and Goodman-Hill’s alarmingly quick character change is still reasonably convincing although credibility is given a good old stretch in terms of Loftus’ character somehow not seeing any of that coming considering they’re an item.

As the reluctant heroine/investigator, Loftus comes across as more than likeable enough for the viewer to car when she’s placing herself in potential danger, which is quite often, and her concern for those around her just about balances out the jaw-dropping naivety she displays when rifling through the possessions of an absent woman and taking a trip down to a particularly dark and forbidding cellar.

Still, as mentioned previously, this is a horror movie and although the stupid decision is always a point of irritation among genre fans it’s alive and well and doing decent and sometimes darkly amusing work here.

The visuals, unfortunately, are often muddy and unfocused and there’s a lack of filmic sheen about the enterprise. This would most likely work better as a small screen effort and the “BBC Films” caption at the beginning hints that the ideal home for this would be in a one-off Sunday evening slot where the demands are different and the more casual fan of chillers would enjoy its skewed charms.

At just 71 minutes, Homebound doesn’t outstay its welcome and just when I was wondering how far the final act was going to be dragged out in terms of its revelations and showdowns, it was over. Roll titles.

There’s much to be said for a story that doesn’t haul itself back for one last unconvincing twist or scare and, whether or not that’s down to the production’s tight shooting schedule, watching those credits scroll past at not long after the hour mark was unexpected and welcome in an era when films in general just don’t know when to stop.

For all its flaws, including a central mystery with a denouement that most will see coming a mile off, Homebound still manages to intrigue due to its innate oddness, a cast that leans into those classic behaviours of genre characters and a reveal which will benefit those who agree with the concept that the things you don’t see are far scarier rather than the things you do.

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