David’s Download: The Home and Together Reviews
This week for David’s Download, it’s finally time to cover two horror films that I caught in theaters at the end of July - The Home, starring Pete Davidson, and Together, starring real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie. Despite their horror classification, these movies couldn’t be more different. For starters, one is a dumpster fire and the other is kind of a masterpiece.
The Home
Let’s begin with The Home, aka the dumpster fire. I was genuinely looking forward to seeing this movie, as our Raw Riders know I love fright flicks and I thought it was a cool idea to cast Pete Davidson against type. Unfortunately, my optimism was squandered by a movie that isn’t really sure what it wants to be.
Davidson plays a delinquent sentenced to community service at a retirement home, where he must live on site. At first he attributes the residents’ strange behavior to their senility, but after he discovers the 4th floor is off limits and a couple unusual deaths occur, he suspects something more sinister is going on behind the scenes of this peculiar home.
The paint-by-numbers set up rips pages directly from countless other horror movies and TV shows you’ve probably seen, most notably Get Out and Shutter Island, but is executed without the steady pacing and tonal balance of those classics.
After a couple scenes intended to invoke terror, it became apparent that Davidson is horribly miscast, and there are times that it’s difficult to discern whether you’re watching a forthright horror movie or an SNL parody about nursing homes.
The movie attempts to wrap up its mystery with a convoluted explanation that once again rips from Get Out, and attempts to drive home a message about generational divide and clinging to the past, a theme that was much more effectually tackled by Clown in a Cornfield earlier this year.
After this disappointing reveal, The Home devolves into a gory bloodbath that completely mismatches everything that precedes it and makes you wish the makers had just taken this gonzo approach to the whole thing.
Together
On the other hand, Together is another victory for body horror following last year’s The Substance.
The movie follows a couple, Tim and Millie, city dwellers who move to quiet, upstate New York after years in a relationship. During a hike on their first week at the new place, they get stranded in an underground cavern, where they come in contact with a pool of water that has a sort of transformative power. Once they escape and return to their everyday lives, they become increasingly drawn to one another to the point where their bodies start trying to fuse together. This leads to some grotesque scenes of body horror as our two stars attempt to defy the supernatural powers forcing them to become one.
Much like The Substance was a brilliant commentary on aging in Hollywood, Together teeters between cautionary tale and celebration of longterm relationships and codependency, and the casting of real-life couple Franco and Brie adds a fun meta-textual layer to the proceedings. Both actors deftly balance the scenes of anxiety and terror with some well-placed moments of comedy and romance. There is also one jump scare in particular that almost made me spill my popcorn.
Whether or not you love the ending, everything up to that point is so skillfully done that you’ll be thinking about Together long after you leave the theater. I can tell you Matt/Tacco wanted to keep some space between us for at least 24 hours after watching Together haha!