Homebound (2022) (Movie Review)

Sebastian Godwin’s Homebound marks another notch in the “kids be crazy” subgenre. In some ways the writer/director’s feature debut plays out a bit like a role reversal with Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s The Lodge, but without the isolation and snowy doom. However, even with its remarkably slight run-time Homebound can’t quite out maneuver it's cliched trappings and fails to set itself apart from the bevy of other “something’s wrong with those kids” offerings.

Holly (Aisling Loftus) is off to the countryside home of her fiancé Richard’s (Tom Goodwin-Hill) ex-wife, Nina, to meet Richard’s three children for the first time. Upon arriving something is immediately amiss as Nina is nowhere to be found and the kids are acting a tad angsty and dodgy (shocking for a pair of teenagers and an adolescent, right?). Things only escalate as the getaway goes on as Holly tries to figure out exactly what she’s gotten herself into.

Aisling Loftus provides pretty well everything needed to make Homebound as watchable as it is, though that’s a faint bit of praise, as a single performance alone even with a short as this is, is not enough to sustain a full length feature. The kids too are just vaguely evil enough to propel the mystery of why they are the way they are. It’s only until you arrive at the climax that all that goodwill unravels and audiences are likely to feel nothing more than a “oh so that was it?” reaction. The foreboding tone of the horror tuned violin score and harmonious harp melodies are inspired and another one of the bright spots that is otherwise wasted on a stale and unfinished idea.

Clocking in at a lean 71 minutes, you can easily conjure one of two assumptions about Homebound. The first is that it’s a tightly wound psychodrama that conceals and dolls out its secrets methodically and with near perfect timing. The second one is that it is a film that began as a single intriguing concept that tragically flattened out substantially the more it was stretched to full length—or at least something resembling feature length. Sadly as one could likely gather from the review this far, the latter is more accurate in this case as, despite the cast's best efforts, there simply just is not enough here to make this memorable.

Homebound is a film that’s about as generic as its oft used title. Like many, there are elements that make for an intermittently watchable thriller, but that feels all the more disappointing and derivative once all the cards are on the table. In horror, kids can be terrifying, unpredictable monsters that lure you in with how innocent they appear to be and unfortunately Homebound never manages to do anything more than graze the surface of that well-loved horror premise and when the credits roll this one is entirely too easy to forget.