Jack Goes Home (2016)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Jack (Rory Culkin) writes for a magazine in L.A. He is a wordsmith, but doesn't interact normally, but is functional. Hearing that his father has passed in an accident, Jack goes home to help his mother (Lin Shaye) who has her own issues. Jack sleep walks, hallucinates, enjoys substance abuse, and has a secret in the attic. The ending has a twist which I should have seen coming.Be careful what you read, as the twist makes the film and can easily ruin it. The plot spoilers are out there. The film is a psychological thriller, as we unlock the secrets in the attic with Jack. During the film, there is a house close next door that can be seen from Jack's window. At the end they show an aerial view of the house, which clearly doesn't have any house that close. I liked the performances and dialogue is spite of some formula writing.Guide: F-word. MM sex. No nudity

Thomas Dekker's new delightfully creepy psychological thriller, Jack Goes Home, is an intriguing dive into a young man's overwhelming grief. It was a favorite at the 2016 SXSW and was released October 14, 2016, to theaters, and on Video On Demand and iTunes. Don't miss this one.Dekker has learned his craft well and mastered the art of storytelling. Watching this film is like crossing a stream and trying to keep your feet dry by stepping on the rocks. When you get to the rapids, it's impossible to keep from getting swallowed whole and being completely immersed in the horror in Jack's mind. You lose track of which way is up, and what is real and what is not.As the film begins, Jack Thurlowe (Rory Culkin) is at work. He seems normal, if a bit eccentric and acerbic, and we find he and his fiancée are expecting a child. After his parents are involved in a horrific car accident, Jack is forced to return to his childhood home. Being there stirs up memories, real or imaged, in Jack's mind.Jack's mother, Teresa—played impeccably by Lin Shaye, queen of the horror genre— vacillates between nurturing and terrorizing. I found myself wondering how much of his mother was real and how much a projection of Jack. And what really happened up in that creepy attic.The one thing that seems real throughout the story is Jack's best friend, Shanda (Daveigh Chase), a large rock for Jack to cling to when the turbulence in his mind threatens to overcome him.Dekker shows a keen ability to get his actors to create believable characters in an horrifying story. Culkin was mesmerizing as Jack, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes stoic, sometimes chaotic. His life-long career as an actor—he's been acting since he was three—shows in the maturity he brought to this role. When the director needed her to oscillate between a loving, caring mother and a vicious, vindictive villain, Shaye was able to do this with ease. Chase captured well the concern of a friend trying to hold Jack in the real world throughout his rejections and violent attacks. Louis Hunter gave a sinister quality to the horny boy next door, Duncan, making me question his motivations.Jack's demons were reminiscent of the ones in The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014), Tale of Two Sisters (Kim Jee-woon, 2004), and Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, 2004). The element of a traumatized mind trying to make sense of nightmarish events is there in all of these.The lovely and peaceful setting in Kingston, New York, provided a stark contrast to the turmoil in Jack's mind. The outdoor cinematography, by Austin F. Schmidt, was very impactful—making Jack look small and insignificant as he enters the enormous family home, and later, at the funeral. The score, by Ceiri Torjessun, added ample creepiness and tension—even the soft, lyrical numbers had edgy undertones. It's available on iTunes.Dekker invested a lot of himself in this story. He, too, was a victim of child abuse, and has had to deal with the grief of losing his own father as a young man. Life experiences like these help a writer find real emotions to portray. I recognized my own reactions to people around me trying to make sure I was all right after the death of my husband—their awkwardness, my reassurances, were all there in Jack's interactions with the people he encounters.I'm very impressed with Thomas Dekker. Like Culkin, he's been acting since he was a young child. He's worked with the likes of John Carpenter (Village of the Damned, 1995), Gregg Araki (Kaboom, 2010) and Robert Hall (Fear Clinic, 2015), all of whose influences are seen in Jack Goes Home. Dekker wrote and directed his first film, Whore (2008), at the tender age of nineteen and has also released two music albums.Jack Goes Home was produced by Yale Productions and SSS Entertainment in association with Isle Empire Pictures, and distributed in the US by Momentum Pictures.Dekker and Culkin worked together again this year on Welcome to Willits (Trevor and Tim Ryan), which will be out in 2017. It's nice to see these young men continuing to create creepy horror films.

I enjoyed this one, because in my honest opinion, it had a lot to offer. From the great acting, to the dialogue, the effects, the plot, the confusion, everything falls quite lovely in place and the puzzle reveals itself little by little. I had fun here, I kept asking myself questions, I was waiting to see more, started to suspect on and the other.It is a beautiful psychological drama, with some horror elements to spark the atmosphere, and pretty much no dull moments. So if you are a fan of the oldies and crazies like Identity, The Pact, Session 9, this one will fit the list just fine. Some will consider it better, some perhaps not so much, but you will find a lot of familiar traces here. Jack Goes Home is indeed a little gem of a movie, that should be recommended and watched by more people because it surely delivers on so many levels. Of course, bare in mind, I did say, little movie. I won't place it up there, with your big budget productions. Cheers!

"Jack Goes Home" is a psychological Thriller (with some horror elements) about a boy named Jack (Rory Culkin) whose dad is killed in a car accident, after hearing the news he returns home to help his mother with the funeral and cope with the whole ordeal. As Jack struggles with the loss of his father he starts to notice strange behavior from his mother while also attempting to uncover possible secrets that his parents have been hiding from him for years. I thought the plot line was interesting enough, unfortunately the movie does a poor job of developing and delivering it. The movie is essentially about a man's struggle with the loss of his parent and his own mental instability. I like movies that dig into the human mind and really focus on one individual slowly losing it, however "Jack Came Home" does a very poor job of pulling that off. Jack is a pretty unlikable character from the get go, he's emotionless, dull, and really has no interesting character traits so to be honest I really had trouble watching him mope around and complain about everything for almost two hours. Jack's mother (player by Lin Shaye) is an interesting character and makes for some of the more interesting scenes in the movie, unfortunately she isn't featured that much.The movie tries to keep things interesting by throwing in a little bit of mystery but again they just do such a poor job of developing it, by the time big reveals are made you will have likely figured everything out and be bored with it. I saw the final twist coming a mile away, so much so that I kept telling myself maybe that wouldn't be the twist since it was so predictable. I feel like they had the right idea in a lot of places but then just completely dropped the ball in the points that mattered most. As far as indie horror movie goes "Jack Goes Home" is far from one of the worst, even though it's barely a horror movie, but it is definitely not anything to write home about. It's predictable, drab, and pretty dry overall.