Camila (Monique Gabriela Curnen) is a single parent to Jamie (Luke Ganalon), and she’s in one hell of a bad way… the pair have lived in a motel, and Camila has some mental health baggage that’s for sure.
Everything begins coming up Cammy though, and she lands a gig as a live-in housekeeper for a swank-ass model home (surrounded by desert) that must be kept clean and decorated at all times so prospective buyers can be enticed to separate themselves from their dough and move into the as-yet unpopulated development.
Speaking of “decorating” and “unpopulated”; the isolation and pressure to keep the place lookin’ fancy begin playing on her already wonky brain, and before long Big C begins going shit-house!
Full of surreal fever-dream images, black humor, and slick as balls cinematography, Anyone Home? has a lot going for it. It definitely has that Shining vibe to it with the secluded locale, deranged nature of it’s main character, and a rapidly crumbling family dynamic, but it adds it’s own flavor by bringing to task the fact that some folks (the main characters are Latino for those of you keeping score at home) find themselves economically marginalized in our society.
Another way Anyone Home? sets itself apart is that the horror here, for better or worse, is not of supernatural origin, rather it’s the result of Camila’s psychosis. Some of you may dig on that, and others won’t (I prefer things full of preternatural presences myself), but either way the film keeps things uneasy thanks to the highly effective off-kilter visuals provided by co-writer (along with William Day Frank)/director Patrick Cunningham.
If there is any real fault with the narrative of Anyone Home?, it’s that Camila could be fleshed out a tad more; we get bits and pieces of her past via flashback sequences, but other than that she arrives on the scene, then goes bonkers with little else offered to us.
At the end of the day, Anyone Home? is a nice slice of the ol’ psychological horror, with a slick style and enough nightmare images to keep horror hounds satisfied!
