The Home

The Horror of Forgetting, and the Terror of Cognitive Collapse.

Horror is no longer the preserve of nubile teens in peril—it is increasingly turning its lens toward the elderly, confronting uncomfortable truths about ageing, dementia, and society’s handling of both.

In recent years, the so-called geriatric-horror subgenre has gained traction, with films such as “The Taking of Deborah Logan,” “The Manor,” “Old People,” and, more recently, the remarkable “The Rule of Jenny Pen” exploring the terror that lies at the fraying edges of memory and mortality.

The latest addition to this growing canon is “Hemmet aka The Home,” a Swedish slow-burn chiller directed by Mattias J. Skoglund.

A deeply unsettling meditation on elder abuse, dementia, and the often invisible toll of caregiving, it dares to place ageing—and its corrosive psychological effects—at the heart of its horror.

The story follows Joel (Philip Oros), who returns home to help his mother Monika (Anki Lidén) transition into a residential care facility. Diagnosed with dementia, Monika is thought to be safest under professional supervision.

But Joel’s initial relief quickly dissipates when his mother begins behaving strangely. Something is not quite right at the care home—and it may be more than just the cruelty of cognitive decline.

While Sweden’s social model often prides itself on dignified elder care, “The Home” casts a chilling shadow over that ideal, suggesting that institutional trust can mask something far more insidious.

When Skoglund leans into traditional horror territory, he proves himself more than capable. “The Home” is punctuated by well-timed, genuinely startling jump scares that jolt the viewer without feeling gratuitous.

One particularly unnerving sequence shows Joel peering down a long hallway bathed in dim, clinical light, the silence disturbed only by the soft, irregular tapping of something unseen.

Skoglund’s expert use of negative space—often letting empty corridors, shadowed corners, and sterile rooms dominate the frame—creates unease even when nothing overtly terrifying is present. Every shot hums with a subtle, disorienting wrongness.

Some of the most memorable scenes involve Monika herself, whose body contorts and twists in grotesquely unnatural ways.

These physical distortions are both disturbing and strangely poetic, mirroring the inner collapse brought on by the fraying of the mind, and amplifying the film’s steadily encroaching sense of dread.

Despite its occasional shocks, “The Home” is not overtly horrifying in the conventional sense. Instead, it is a powerfully atmospheric film that unsettles through implication, silence, and psychological unease.

Skoglund confronts the viewer with difficult, real-world themes—elder neglect, the erosion of identity, and the bureaucratic coldness of care systems—making the experience uncomfortable even when the horror isn’t front and centre.

The result is one of the most quietly effective and thematically daring genre entries of the year so far—unflinching in its portrayal of cognitive collapse and fearless in turning societal ideals into sources of terror.

If this is the direction geriatric horror is headed, “The Home” cements the subgenre not as a novelty, but as one of horror’s most vital, human, and harrowing frontiers.

WATCHED AT:

NIFFF 2025