4 out of 5

Directed by: Christopher Denham

This one deserves extra notice in the very-often-disappointing found footage genre: it might not stray too far from what you expect from the outset, but it commits, and it gets in and out in an appreciably slim 76 minutes.

David (Adrian Pasdar) and Clare (Cady McClain) are a husband and wife who’ve moved their family into a remote home, seemingly in support of Clare’s work as a children’s psychiatrist – also the reason for their procurement of a video camera, though David has adapted it for use as an ongoing document of the family. This document is what we’re watching, as it happens to capture increasingly disconcerting events involving the couple’s children, Jack (Austin Williams) and Emily (Amber Joy Williams), who display behaviors that both Clare and David – a pastor – seek to explain within their own frameworks.

Any Criminal Minds viewer will clock some problematic antics from Jack and Emily, but their mute, solemn stares also play in to the cinematic tradition of Creepy Kids. That said, Home Movie is not having fun with that shtick, and playing around with tropes: rather, writer / director Christopher Denham really tries to capture the nature of denial: both in terms of David and Clare trying to ignore or justify their children’s actions, but also their own, as we outside observers get to clock questionable things they do and say. Even from a more meta perspective, though I’ll criticize the “why are we filming?” aspect in a moment, both David clinging to using the camera to perform constantly – acting like a goofball in front of his family – and Clare alternating between some vague justification of keeping the camera rolling for work versus asking David to turn the camera off are signs of internal disconnects these two have, with themselves, with each other, with their roles in the family. It’s pretty brilliant how effective the movie is at studying that without having to say much out loud about it.

Which is… an interesting feint. Denham cleverly avoids the aforementioned “Why?” plaguing question of Found Footage by moving fast, and kind of cutting around it. There’s a further layer to the viewing as we see the footage rewound or skipped through on occasion, as though another hand is (within the film’s world) controlling what we see; that means that the work a FF flick normally has to do to justify the constant camera presence, or give us more background on who these characters are and why they moved and so on – we’re kind of forced to allow more wiggle room via this external cutting hand. At the same time, the movie could be said to go so far in that direction of abstraction that all you can do is wait for the scary kid shoe to drop, with any remaining plot seeming like filler. Again, the solution is for Denham to move so fast that you can’t quite question it, but due to the repetition of “here’s some disturbing footage that I’m going to build up to and then cut away from,” you start to suspect that a bigger budget would’ve resulted in a longer, more fleshed out movie. (Though whether not it would’ve been a better one…?)

While ultimately more explicit with its actual depiction of evil, Home Movie falls into the Krisha camp of horror: the tension comes from watching this family unravel, and likely recognizing where you’d fit into this experience – maybe even where you have fit into it, in hopefully less violent permutations – before Denham pulls the record on some pretty devious stuff in the final act, making sure you watch the credits roll with one of those great, empty-feeling chills.