Home Sweet Home

(2013) **1/2

In the suburbs of New York a man breaks into a large home, disables the security system, and spends 20 minutes nailing all the windows shut and installing surveillance equipment.  We never see his face.  When the owners of the home return he hides in the shadows and spies on them as they proceed with the usual humdrum marital discourse.  When the wife decides to take a shower in preparation for sex, the husband is taken by surprise and knocked out.  Dressing up in a cheerleading outfit following her shower (come on, marital sex gets boring and you have to spice it up once in a while), the wife quickly discovers her bloodied husband and is immediately knocked herself.  Chained to a radiator in her bedroom she gets her first glimpse of her assailant, a large man clad in a creepy mask.  Who is he and why is he doing this?  Freeing herself from her rstraints she attempts to escape as the home invader tracks her every move.

Shot in 81 minutes real time, Home Sweet Home could have been told in half that time.  The opening is creepy and the final act is pretty great but the middle is padded to death.  We have long sequences of the wife crawling around the house in an attempt to evade her stalker.  I’m not a huge fan of home invasion movies unless there is some sort of a payoff.  The yardstick by which I measure a home invasion film is between “You’re Next” (total payoff) and The Strangers (no payoff) with Home Sweet Home lying somewhere in the middle.  There is no characterization and the invader’s motives remain unclear, however there are some good pipe-in-the-ass moments, just not enough.  Oddly enough another film entitled Home Sweet Home was released the same month this came out.  Tatty!