スイート・マイホーム 「Sui-to Mai Ho-mu」
Release Date: September 01st, 2023
Duration: 113 mins.
Director: Takumi Saitoh
Writer: Yutaka Kuramochi (Screenplay), Rinko Kamizu (Original Novel)
Starring: Masataka Kubota, Misako Renbutsu, Nao, Yosuke Kubozuka, Ayumu Nakajima, Toshie Negishi, Ririka,
Takumi Saitoh is a really exciting actor – see Shin Ultraman where he is mostly monosyllabic and yet still massively charismatic – and he also has directing credits to his name via the drama BLANK 13 and a segment of the comedy omnibus film Zokki. For his third feature, he adapts Rinko Kamizu’s novel Sweet My Home into a finely honed psychological thriller full of deceit and fear that flirts with horror as it gives us a neat spin on the haunted house formula to subvert a search for a perfect life.
A home is meant to be a place of safety and love. Certainly, this is something that main protag Kenji Kiyosawa (Masataka Kubota) seemingly yearns for. With his wife Hitomi (Misako Renbutsu) and daughter (and a baby soon to join them) to care for, he commissions the construction of the ideal family space with a heating system to keep them warm during the cold Nagano winters and security cameras to monitor the children day and night.
They are a picture-perfect family of four with a shiny new home of their dreams but it soon turns into a nightmare as they find themselves at the centre of a string of suspicious incidents.
A tightly-wound suspense story unfolds as we see find out that all is not right with both the house and the people connected to it as, behind the facades of characters and setting, are forces of violence that find their motivations rooted in family trauma from the past. It begins quietly, at first…
While old houses with lots of history tend to make the most obvious horror host settings, Saitoh skilfully plays up the new-build quality of the dream home for most of the running time. The film’s visuals are bright and pristine and present the house and Nagano as a contemporary and coveted place to live that audiences will identify with. The isolation of the location, a claustrophobic basement, and cut-aways to spiders webs may initially put a viewer on guard but guessing what will happen next is harder.
In a classic example of horror subversion of the domestic space, Saitoh builds a nebulous sense of unease for viewers through the alienating effects of having an intruder present and slowly making the home hostile.
Tension is ratcheted up through glimpses of shadowy figures and ominous sounds and all the while, Saitoh uses tight and slow-moving camerawork in cramped spaces in ways that remind one of the visualisation of the interiors of the Ju-On and Insidious films until the film crescendos when the smart systems running the house and its very spaces are used to torment characters in cruel sequences. That written, this is less a film of jump scares and more of one where the atmosphere becomes unbearably discomfiting until a shocking reveal that is almost ripped from headlines past – and Saitoh milks this atmosphere for maximum effect.
What makes the film work really well beyond the fine direction and atmosphere building, however, is that the script introduces a wide cast of characters whose motivations and relationships to Kenji all become dubious.
Audiences are kept suspicious of the people around him – the nice real estate agent is quite a manipulative monster trying to get some kickbacks from making the house, Kenji has an older brother whose psychological problems and ramblings hint that the family is afflicted by the supernatural, and then there is Kenji himself who proves to be an unreliable figure to follow.
Unsympathetic at times he may be, a little lacking in urgency with his actions when it comes to caring for his family, the script slowly builds up Kenji’s horror until we sympathise with him. Flashbacks dropped throughout the film and his claustrophobia hint at a dark past that, when all is revealed, packs a punch and contributes to the tragedy of a story where people pursue that ideal life.
These elements allows the film to have lots of successful misdirects that evoke surprise as alarming plot twists linked to blackmail and more occur. The feeling of being led down multiple avenues of suspicion and having to recalculate our assumptions about everyone makes the story engrossing. As a result, this is a well made suspense thriller that should have viewers on the edge of their seats as it goes through a twisting and turning plot with shock revelations.
When all is revealed, it’s a genuine “oh my word,” moment that left my jaw on the floor.
Ultimately, Home Sweet Home draws the viewer in with a finely directed story full of threats that slowly wrap around the family. Once death intrudes, the suspense rises but undergirding all of this, and providing a point of poignancy for the film, is the various character’s pursuit of the perfect family life and home. When the plot returns to family trauma and the quest for stability sought be everyone, something the audience can identify with, and it comes full circle with history, it leads to a surprising and fiendishly evil ending that will shock and cap a neat thriller.
Home Sweet Home plays on Thursday, Jul 27th, at 21:00 at the Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center. It will have an introduction and Q&A with director Takumi Saitoh.