Show Some Love: Anyone Home?
This is the second entry in a recurring series for Horror Bound where I seek out the most obscure horror films with the goal of getting more people to watch, rate and review. Hidden gem wouldn’t be an accurate description as many of these films are basically lost and forgotten, buried under an avalanche of content on the various streaming platforms that grows every day. To find these films, I scoured the deep recesses of Letterboxd which has over 5,000 horror films listed as available for streaming on Amazon, Netflix, Tubi and Shudder. I sorted the films by popularity and went through the bottom 1,000 or so films checking cover art, reading synopses and watching over 100 trailers for films on YouTube to put together the list of films for this series.
This month’s film is the 2018 psychological horror film Anyone Home?
Tagline and Synopsis: A single mother entertains a dangerous fantasy after she's recruited to live in an unsold property in an empty development.
Stats compared to Similar films: Usually this section is used to compare the film to similar films but I am struggling to find something similar. It’s like The Shining without Kubrick, Rubber without the tire and The Burbs but not at all.
Letterboxd: 40 views, 8 reviews
IMDB: 107 ratings, 3 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes: NOTHING. There is no movie art and it shows the film coming out in 2019 instead of 2018.
Let me just say, this movie is absolutely insane. The whole entire film is fascinating because it will have you on the edge of your seat wondering what’s going to happen next, but at the same time you will have no idea what is going on or what has happened already. Anyone Home is perhaps one of the best representations of a descent into madness that you could ever see thanks to the outstanding performance of Monique Gabriela Curnen, who you may remember as the lady who sold out Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight.
Curnen plays Camilla, a young single mother who is taking on a new job working as a house sitter in a new residential neighborhood. Due to issues with the housing market, many of these newly built homes are vacant due to foreclosures or no demand. To stop vagrants and squatters, her company employs people to live in the houses and decorate in an effort to lure new buyers to the neighborhood. She is accompanied by her young son Jaime who keeps Camilla sane, in more ways than one.
The film never explores what exactly is Camilla’s form of mental illness, but she takes TONS of pills daily and has numerous nervous ticks. Her young son keeps her on her pill schedule with a printed up form of the size, shape and color of all the pills she has to take at morning, noon and night. He also works as a pseudo-pharmacologist adjusting his mother’s meds to meet her needs and addressing issues as they develop.
Everything after the introduction of the main characters is bizarre, insane and reality warping as Camilla decides she doesn’t need her meds, she just needs crafts…
We get flashbacks to Camilla painting a hotel white. Like everything, TV, walls, furniture, bed her son. White. “It needs to be clean,” she says as she dips her son’s toys into white paint. She obsessively decorates and crafts, mostly Christmas decorations as she is obsessed with a picture of a family celebrating Christmas from one of those old department store magazines. We get flashbacks to more weirdness at the home that left young Jaime mentally scarred so he is always wearing arm floaties. There’s a dog in the neighborhood that he chases around which I think belongs to an unseen man who lives in an RV who also enjoys crafts. There are tons of scenes in the craft store, tons of scenes with Jaime doing kung fu to a mannequin and the whole universe twisting and turning upside down as Camilla descends further into madness.
All of this culminates with a Christmas in July massacre for the ages. Camilla’s ideas of a perfect life, perfect house and perfect husband jump off of the crinkled magazine page into reality. She overly decorates the house with Christmas decorations inside and out. Young Jaime, worried his mother is off of her medications, is locked in his bedroom away from his mother’s insanity. Camilla grows more and more impulsive and the film gets more and more insane as she does. Reality is lost. Past and present narratives began playing out at the same time until finally, the climax of the film explodes onto the screen in all it’s Christmas glory.
This film is mad, but extremely well done. There is nothing in this film that would give you any indication that it is very low budget and very indie. The acting is amazing, the cinematography is fantastic! Definitely not your typical horror movie with a very wild style and a narrative that is closer to an art film than straight up horror that the trailer and poster art would indicate. A fantastic film by a debuting director, Patrick Cunnigham, and a fantastic performance from Monique Gabriela Curnen who, based on this performance we should be seeing in more leading roles in the future.
Overall, Anyone Home? Aka Model Home is an intoxicating, reality bending descent into madness. A film that falls into a category of its own which can only be described as “Mental Health Horror”. Check this film out today streaming on Amazon and Tubi and be sure to leave a review or rating on one of the various platforms like letterboxd or Rotten Tomatoes to Show Some Love to Anyone Home.
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