On April 24, demonic spawn crawled out of the gates of hell in the action horror film «Home Sweet Home: Rebirth», based on the video game «Home Sweet Home», which was released in 2017. The distributor is positioning this project as an action horror based on the popular bestselling survival video game franchise, inspired by the Outlast». Read the review below to find out what the creators of — ended up with.
Pluses:
At the beginning, the movie is at least not boring to watch; the skeleton demon advertised in all promotional materials as the main attraction looks quite impressive;
Minuses:
the movie hardly conveys the spirit of the game; weak visual effects, which makes the encounters between the heroes and the demons hardly exciting; the further the movie goes, the worse it gets; the lack of a striking villain; the skeleton demon is helpless and exists purely for the sake of the surroundings;
«Home Sweet Home: Rebirth»
Genre action horror about the supernatural
Directors Steffan Hacker, Alexander Kiesl
Starring Michele Morrone, William Moseley, Urassaya Sperbund, Alexander Lee
Premiere movie theaters
Year of release 2025
Website IMDb
Jake, a former police officer, was finally able to get away with his wife Prang and daughter Lu for a vacation to Bangkok. But even in these carefree moments, the man is forced to be constantly on the phone and dealing with work issues. However, soon Jake’s detachment will seem like the least of the family’s problems when a crazed maniac visits the shopping center and starts shooting at everyone in sight.
The brave Jake decides to deal with the scoundrel, and he manages to neutralize the crazy killer. However, this showdown leads to an unexpected explosion, after which the protagonist wakes up in a wholly different world. A real apocalypse falls on the capital of Thailand, and among the creatures that have come from hell itself. Jake joins forces with the mysterious monk Chen to not only find his wife and daughter, but also to stop the influx of demonic forces into our suffering world.
An interesting observation is that — «Rebirth: Home, Sweet Home» became one of the three(!) April adaptations of computer games at the Ukrainian box office, along with the recent «A Minecraft Movie» and «Until Dawn», which is currently running in parallel. And that’s if you don’t take into account the start of the second season of «The Last of Us».
«Home, Sweet Home» looks much more modest against the background of the aforementioned adaptations, but it only confirms the fact that nowadays the transfer of video game motifs to the movie screen is trendy as never before. This is a real rebirth.
The novelty was the result of a Thai-American co-production, with the «Yggdrazil Group», which also developed the original game, involved in the production. The film was made with an eye on the international market, although, of course, by American standards, it looks, let’s say, nondescript. And it is precisely because of these ambitions that elements of Thai folklore were largely ignored in the game, and the main characters are presented as tourists, not Bangkok residents.
The movie begins quite cheerfully — before 15 minutes have passed, we see a madman with a machine gun, and a little later — something like an invasion walking dead, only the zombies here are not quite zombies. The immortal student with a clerical knife will also appear in the frame, which will surely please fans of the game (as well as, for example, bloody portals), but the authors safely discarded her backstory.
At the same time, even though the possibilities are far from endless, the creators are not limited to the narrow dark corridors of 2000s adaptations like «Resident Evil» and «Doom», which are also appropriate in the context of the original source. The filmmakers do not deny themselves the pleasure of scaling up the action in some way, so alongside the passions in the mall, there is their desire, in the best Hollywood traditions, to savor the apocalypse. With general plans of the burning metropolis, scenes of total chaos and, of course, the main characters at the epicenter of the beginning of the end.
Towards the middle of the timing, a huge ogre — a skeletal demon the size of a kaiju, which looks quite impressive, but in terms of usefulness for its infernal brethren — is completely helpless.
So, the first half of the movie, although not promising and not particularly surprising, is lively, and at least it doesn’t put you to sleep while watching it. But in the second half, when a novice monk fully enters the story and explains what the hell is going on here, the level of idiocy begins to rise rapidly. Yes, perhaps we shouldn’t expect a complex mythology from an adaptation of a Thai game, but the world order proposed in the movie is completely unviable.
The entire local miracle substitute is based not only on secondary, but on rusty narrative tropes that have long since worn out. It’s hardly possible to build a coherent story on such tropes today.
It begins with the phrases «you are chosen» and «you cannot escape your fate», is supported by typical tossing between the realities of the living and the dead, which was enough at least in «Supernatural» (in the world of the living, spirits need a physical shell). It ends with a completely inexpressive final showdown that will go down as «Mortal Kombat» at minimum settings — warlike Asians with supernatural powers are added. The short scenes with demonic creatures in the frame leave much to be desired: the creatures themselves are not well done, and the ridiculous battles with them do not stand up to any criticism.
What happened in the end? A movie based on a game, which the important components of this game prefer to ignore. A movie about demons that looks more like a zombie movie. A budget apocalypse that pretends to be a blockbuster. In the end, an application for something inspired by «Outlast», and an execution that is not too far from some «Doom: Annihilation».
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