Nilam Farooq shines in Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives, yet despite her performance and the innovative one take in real-time concept, the film labours to predictable points. A well done film let down by a lacklustre script.

When pregnant Maria (Nilam Farooq) starts readying her fiancé’s family estate for bed and breakfast guests, something isn’t right; the power seems to be on the blink, and strange noises become all too common. Determined to find the truth, Maria soon begins to realise that darker secrets than she could imagine are lurking in this house and her soon-to-be family’s past.

Some German horror films tend to look back at the country’s own horrific periods and magnify them to suit their own needs. In most cases, this works, as guilt is one hell of a thing to utilise in your movie; with Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives, however, it doesn’t wholly work. It almost feels like a tacked-on inclusion or something to help get the required funding.

Anything could have been placed in here instead of Third Reich connections. It almost feels cheap in its inclusion due to how compact the rest of the story is. When the reveals begin to unfurl towards Maria and the audience, you almost mutter “of course” at the screen. As if that bait to use the evil of the Third Reich was too tempting a lure to not utilise. It’s disappointing, but it’s not something that ruins the entire feeling of what Seiben achieves in his film.

Most of that is due to the great performance of Nilam Farooq, who really has the entirety of Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives hanging on her shoulders. Luckily, she is more than up for the task of carrying the film, and while she is vulnerable in her 8-month pregnant state, she is always thinking, and with Farooq’s performance, you can see her do that in real-time. She is paranoid, not only for herself but her baby. However, that seems to trigger an empowered defence in her to try and take ownership of her situation. She isn’t going to give up without one hell of a fight, and you feel that from the outset once the supernatural shenanigans start.

While one of the selling points of Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives is that it is a single shot in real-time film. Yet, it plays fairly loosey-goosey with that concept, for it starts in a nonlinear fashion and even contains a dream-esque sequence. By refraining from being as stringent on its concept, Thomas Sieben allows the film to open up a tad, as occasionally, films under such self-made restrictions can stumble over themselves to work successfully. Here, seeing as the film has some less-than-realistic moments within, it can get away with what it does.

What hurts Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives is just how predictable each moment is. Seiben and Farooq do a lot of heavy lifting to make the audience scared of Maria. Still, that fear never fully takes hold of the audience. We can see the beats coming, and while the context is different on this occasion, we are never as terrified of Maria as we need to be. That said, Seiben does his utmost to keep us on our toes with figures in the background, causing the odd scare here and there.

Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives is on digital platforms on 30 September 2024

★★★

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