The Home (Hemmet) (2025)

The Home (Hemmet) had its world premiere at SXSW on 10 Mar 2025

Over the titles on a black background that open Mattias J Skoglund’s The Home (Hemmet), we hear the sound of water running, then a dish falling to the floor, then a female cry of distress and a thud as she too falls. Next we see a kitchen sink, with the tap still running and the bubbles from the washing up liquid rising in the basin to overflow – yet while we can hear a woman crying out, “No, no! No. No! Away! Away! Go away!”, we cannot see her, for she is lying on the floor, out of shot – reduced to an absent ghost. After all, Monika (Anki Lidén) is elderly, her husband died years ago, her two adult sons have long since flown the coop, and as she suffers a stroke in her own home, she is entirely alone. Or perhaps not quite entirely – for her very words suggest that, even in her vulnerable state, she senses an unwelcome presence to match, and to take advantage of, her own absence. Someone or something is coming for her, and will not take no for an answer.

Returning home for the first time in years, wayward son Joel (Philip Oros) heads by ferry from Stockholm to supervise his mother’s transition to the Eskuggan care home for the elderly – and while staying in his childhood home, he also reverts to some of his old habits, like drinking and drugs. Joel got out of here at a young age for a reason. For this is a place full of bad associations, where memories of his cruel, bullying, abusive father Bengt (Peter Jankert) still haunt him. Yet his mother, though addled, insists that Bengt is back, and Joel, still traumatised from his experiences growing up, can sense Bengt’s baleful reemergence too. “I see dad all the time,” he tells his old schoolfriend Nina (Gizem Erdogan) who now works as a nurse at Eskuggan, “so either I’m crazy, or he’s back somehow.”

That is indeed the central ambiguity in The Home, which Skoglund co-adapted with Mats Strandberg from Strandberg’s 2017 novel of the same name. For even as the film’s very title comes with a double reference – both to Eskuggan into which Monika reluctantly moves, and to the home that she leaves behind, still filled with the detritus of a dysfunctional family life there – there is a certain nebulousness as to whether she and Joel are just working through their unresolved issues at this significant juncture in their lives and in their estranged relationship, or they really are under attack from a malevolent spirit looking for human hosts susceptible to its possessive influence.

Of course, these two interpretations – one psychological, the other supernatural or mythic – readily overlap and complement each other, and need not be mutually exclusive. For here, as in Don Coscarelli’s Bubba Ho-tep (2002), Adrián García Bogliano’s Late Phases (2014) and James Ashcroft’s The Rule of Jenny Pen (2024), the elderly prove easy prey to demonic malice. Meanwhile, like Keith Wright’s Harold’s Going Stiff (2011), Perci Intalan’s Dementia (2014), Mike Testin’s Dementia (2015) and its sort-of sequel Dementia Part II (2018), Jordan Graham’s Sator (2019), Xia Magnus’ Sanzaru (2020) and Natalie Erika James’ Relic (2020), The Home holds up a mirror, polished with genre, to the guilt and grief, the aversion and enduring love, that can be evoked in those who bear witness to parents drifting out of frame and becoming barely recognisable versions of themselves and absences in their own lives, until they succumb to senility and eventually prove unable to resist the approach of death.