‘Jack Goes Home’, written and directed by Thomas Dekker, will arrive on VOD and Digital HD on October 14th. Rory Culkin stars as Jack, a young man whose life seems to being going great. He has a baby on the way, a good job, but his life gets turned upside down when he receives a call that his mother and father have been in a car accident and his father did not survive. Jack goes home to take care of his mother. His mother, played by horror veteran Lynn Shaye (Insidious), is a strange woman with a cold, mean streak, which Jack clearly inherited. One night Jack discovers a tape of his father telling him to look in the attic, but what Jack finds will change his life forever.
‘Jack Goes Home’ is a dark psychological thriller, filled with more twists than a tilt-a-whirl. The film will have you second guessing if every scene is real, a dream or a delusion. The secret that Jack uncovers (I’m not going to spoil it for you) would bring anyone to their knees and on top of everything Jack just keeps getting hit with more and more bad news. It would be enough to make anyone snap. In the end, you’re left guessing as the film hops between a ghost story, a thriller, a drama, and a horror film. It’s dark and gritty and filled with some of the toughest subject matter a person could face. Dekker puts Jack’s trauma out there in a blunt and matter-of-fact way, which is refreshing. There are no hints, there are no warnings, the film hits you with brutal force, like a punch in the gut.
For me, the events and characters in the film were even more unsettling. Dekker told me in an interview a few days ago that the characters in the film were based on his real life family. Watch the film and you will understand why.
“The inspiration, where it came from was, my father died in 2010 of Alzheimer disease and my father was my world, my universe, my best friend, my everything. I spiraled into quite a dark cloud of depression in the year following and I sort of saw this interesting idea, something I don’t think has really been explored before which was not just see a young person losing a parent, but losing his foundation and where that could go. I was inspired by past films that used horror-tropes to really examine emotional trauma, you know. And I felt there was a movement happening at the time I started writing it, which was great. There was a movement happening where horror was no longer exciting by just having the cat jump out of the corner of the frame, no longer exciting to have just having jump scares and blood. We need something deeper, something darker, something more. To have something more intimately troubling. And so trauma is a word that I use for the whole film, to traumatize the whole audience with one character’s internal trauma. Once that light bulb went off I said, ‘Okay. I can tell in a weird sort of manufactured, magnified way, my own story in the guise of a horror film then that’s great’. It’s punching me in the heart for making it and it’s punching everyone else in the heart for watching it.” Dekker stated.
My verdict, ‘Jack Goes Home’ is definitely worth seeing. It is a fresh idea and it is a film like you have never seen before. It will draw you in and keep your attention and that is rare these days. ‘Jack Goes Home’ will arrive on VOD and Digital HD on October 14th. You really need to see it.
