A beloved author is hospitalized with an unknown ailment. Her daughters put on a brave face for visits, but privately, they wonder if their mother could ever be well again. The sisters return home to an empty house that seems to be buckling under the weight of pained memories. And one night, the house begins to express that pain in wholly unexplainable ways.
That’s all the plot of Home that should be revealed here. The 64-minute psychological thriller, created by local filmmakers Adriel Roman (writer/director) and Edgar Alejandro (director of photography), is a twisty ride whose ambitions exceed its shortcomings. It’s a first-time effort, and it shows—the camerawork is a little shaky at times, and one character’s hairstyle inexplicably changes throughout the film—but Roman and Alejandro do so much with what they’ve got that you can easily ignore the stumbles. The filmmakers make a cheery suburban house look dark and forbidding; they play editing and continuity tricks that demand a second viewing; and most importantly, they draw naturalistic performances out of their two leads, Shirley Van Patten and Maya Wells.
“We don’t give the actors their sides, which is essentially a paragraph or two of the roles that they’re going to rehearse, until they arrive [at the set],” Alejandro says. “Traditionally, you give them a week or two in advance, so they can break it down, practice with it—but with us, it’s how fast you can think on your feet.” He fetes theater actors like Van Patten and Wells for their improvisation skills: “Film actors are pool lifeguards and theater actors are beach lifeguards. Both have the same job, but a theater actor has the conditioning to swim out 50 meters and save somebody’s who’s fighting against the current.”
Alejandro got his appreciation for theater from his time at the Las Vegas Academy of the Arts, which he attended with Roman. It’s also where he learned about color-blind casting (most of Home’s cast is Asian-American, which is never commented upon in the film) and likely also the dogged optimism that inspired the duo—whose production company Rising Again usually specializes in commercial work—to seek out an investor and make a horror film without cheap jump scares or gore, and with a diverse, female-led cast.
“While we were filming, [Roman] had a vision of what he wanted the movie to be, and I didn’t truly understand it. I followed him, I trusted him, but it wasn’t until in the editing, when we were piecing it together, that it clicked for me,” Alejandro says. “It really deviates from traditional horror films; it’s all about moments. The true horror is in the layers that these characters hold underneath instead of the monster or the demon we’ve come to expect.”
Home is currently available as a $5 download from thisisnotyourhome.vhx.tv, and will be available at least through Halloween. But true to its name, Rising Again is already considering its next two projects: a visual album of Roman’s hip-hop tracks and a television series, Singularity. And both, Alejandro says, will employ the theatrical principles that guided Home.
“The beauty of theater is you can captivate an audience with a limited budget—especially in small, black-box productions where you don’t really have a set piece,” he says. “It’s just two actors fighting for something, whether it’s together or against one another. It’s always about the human condition.”
Home Thisisnotyourhome.vhx.tv, $5.
