Hard Home
Hard Home
It seems that someone has immense trust in James Bamford the director. After several years of working as a stuntman and directing various episodes of more or less DC Comics oriented television, Hard Home became the fourth and this year’s film in question. That the last three, Air Force One Down, Jade and Shadow Land were a bit weak in many aspects is in fact a separate issue.
He is here adapting a Mark Shea Price script and she has previously worked on the shorts, The Mayans Were Right and Raised by Fish. It begins with Mary, a novice jogger played by Simone Kessell (Terra Nova, Yellowjackets) who manages to attract a rather strange looking man as she goes off the beaten track to explore an antique cemetery.
He has no problem with her macing him but just before he finishes her off, she injects something into him that knocks him out. He ends up in her Land Rover and she drives off to her designer mansion. She seems to have been Diablo the serial killer and one of his victims was her daughter Kelly, as portrayed by Rosie Day in The Convent and Instructions for a Teenage Armageddon. Now she wants to turn her home into something similar to what Jigsaw did, complete with high-tech gadgets.
The film barely reaches its first act, and already falls into every second rate movie’s plot, where the supposedly competent authorities have been in search of a savage killer for ages, and in just a couple of minutes, the untrained ‘hero’ receives a lead and manages to track down the killer. Very close to the second cliche, there is the expectation involving a killer of women who has a mother virgin tendency to go loco and abuse her children. And one more cliché the film does not avoid is overwhelming poignancy. We see Kelly on crutches of some medical problems and then receive some news that there is a new therapy available for her condition and once she undergoes it, she is among the first batch of Diablo’s victims.
Nevertheless, the most significant issue is that Mary cannot be satisfied with just locking him in the basement and cutting him into pieces, as in every aspect from 7 Days to 3: An Eye for an Eye through to Most of the serial remakes and sequels of I Spit on Your Grave. She has, however, made her home a grotesque shrine to his madness that is rife with hooks, whips, and home video recordings of his crimes as well as cable news themes, all of which are blatantly overstimulating.
Now she is straddled between a daughter’s shrine and a bed of security cameras, readily guiding her son’s image amongst the numerous screens blasting out electricity jolts every now and then. She might not be as maniacal as he is, but she is clearly not in her right mind either.
It’s hard to fathom what the filmmakers had in mind when they decided to have Diablo silently walk through room after room filled with photoshopped images of his offenses. Was it meant to be frightening? If so, it didn’t work for me. It is actually dull because, as much as one can argue that he was a victim of his mother as much as his victims were of him, one should understand that he is not a good person. If your purpose in watching is to see him get hurt then it could be fun. Otherwise, it is quite boring.
The mood doesn’t change even after he throws the rock at Mary, destroys her devices and takes the initiative. The tension only began to build when he threw a rock at her, which in turn created a lot of wobble for absolutely no reason. However, even that is frequently broken by memories of Mary conducting her research, interviewing FBI Agent Wall (Rachel Adedeji, R.I.P.D. 2: Rise of the Damned, Hollyoaks), alienating her husband Robert (Joseph Millson, Fyre Rises, Dragonheart Vengeance) and numerous similar clips of Diablo being shouted at by his mother.
There’s also an extra story about Mary forgetting Jiao, who is the next door’s neighbour and is played by Daphne Cheung, who has acted in Ashes, and Spiderman: Far From Home as Jiao , which is just as ridiculous as the rest of the plot, and is only meant to rescue the script when it finds itself hopelessly stuck in a dead end.
There is also, unfortunately, an element of racism as well as classism to Hard Home that is impossible not to notice. Strange, how a rich white woman gets to save American women by killing a Mexican dia laborer, who happens to be a serial killer ((And the black FBI agent assigned as case officer is so useless that she cannot catch him, good Lord)). The only other non-white character, Jiao, has been so ridiculed as a Karen who the 911 has drolled over her phone number and no response to her calls. It just is a nasty icing on a very dirty cake of hard home.
Hard Home is not difficult because it is so good, and it is the opposite in fact — it’s hard to watch for completely unjustified reasons. And, having watched it, I am only surprised that the distributor was so open, sending the review screeners for distribution the day before the show itself, that there is so little time left, let them out at all. It was quite evident that the reviews were going to be negative.
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- Genre: Thriller
- Country: United States
- Director: James Bamford
- Cast: Simone Kessell, Andrew Howard, Joseph Millson
