When a pretentious movie directly calls out its own pretensions, should the audience give a damn? That’s the question haunting “Jack Goes Home,” the new film from Thomas Dekker, an overlong and high-minded horror movie that doesn’t get to be a fucking horror movie until we’re done slogging through its first hour. If the obvious needs to be pointed out, that question is neither posed by the story nor intended by the storyteller, who concerns himself in earnest with ideas tied to death, family, and norms of grieving. Dekker takes his themes seriously enough that the film reads as personal, though to what extent is its own mystery. Maybe “Jack Goes Home” is inspired from events in Dekker’s own life. Maybe he’s just gripped in existential crisis.
But his utter fascination with mortality doesn’t make the film any good. “Jack Goes Home” is a cautionary tale for writers, in which Dekker, the author and the architect, is far too obsessed with the “stuff” of his film to tend to things like narrative and structure. The film alternately drags and sprints: When it isn’t focused on insignificant details or busy with meaningless character interactions, it’s scurrying to the finish line, skipping over big stretches of track just to make sure it crosses the goal. To say that “Jack Goes Home” cheats would be unfair, so say instead that its technique is sloppy and shockingly undisciplined. Dekker might have potential as a filmmaker, but it’s hard to see it in the film’s disheveled construction.
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As you can probably deduce by the title, “Jack Goes Home” is about a man named Jack (Rory Culkin) who goes home after hearing of his father’s gruesome death via car accident. It turns out that Thomas Wolfe’s posthumous novel is wrong: You can go home again, though if your family is as messed up as Jack’s, you might not want to. His mother, Teresa (Lin Shaye), is either a monster or a ragdoll depending entirely on the setting, though as the film progresses and Jack turns into an unreliable narrator, we start to wonder how monstrous she really is. Aside from Teresa, Jack has his best friend, Shanda (Daveigh Chase), around to keep him company, plus Duncan (Louis Hunter), his neighbor, a creeper with a habit of jerking off while he stares at Jack’s window.
Or is he? It’s hard to tell at first. “Jack Goes Home” likes to toy with our perceptions of reality, but the film neither earns the right to mindscrew nor attires itself as a mindscrew movie to begin with. Instead, Dekker dresses it up as a tale of dark family secrets that intersects with the tropes of the haunted-house category, which, in the spirit of the Halloween season, sounds like a hell of a lot of fun on paper. But “Jack Goes Home” isn’t that, which would be disappointing on its own even if the truth of what it is didn’t turn out to be a king bummer as well, though talking further about that in the context of a review would constitute dereliction of duty. If you want to know what “Jack Goes Home” is really about, you have to watch “Jack Goes Home,” which is sort of like pounding ipecac to test out your intestinal fortitude.
Okay, not really. “Jack Goes Home” isn’t that bad. At the very least, it has Culkin, who plays Jack with as much gravity and humanity as he can; and Shaye, who makes a Herculean effort at keeping us on our toes about the threat and danger Teresa represents (or doesn’t). The trouble is that they’re both filling out roles that are somehow overwritten and underwritten at the same time, tasked with seeking out even-keeled nuance and atmospheric levels of histrionics from one scene to the next. Shaye’s outbursts are impressive to behold, but they also shatter the illusion of her performance and remind us that she’s acting, a sentiment that holds equally true for Culkin, who is given his own fair share of dramatic eruptions to exercise on screen. You wish they were acting in a better-balanced production that doesn’t demand excess from their work. In much of the screen time they share, they make a great pair, but the film’s indecision about its tonal shifts lets them down: quiet and reserved one moment, over the top of the top the next.
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That would be tolerable if “Jack Goes Home” did the one thing a horror film is supposed to do: scare us. The best gauge of a comedy’s quality is how much it makes its audience laugh, and the best gauge of a horror film is how much it sets its audience trembling. “Jack Goes Home” barely registers in this respect, but that brings us back to that first hour, which is all about overture and not atmosphere. This is a film that thinks recitation of poetry inspired by Edgar Allan Poe is the same thing as build-up, the kind of misguided attempt at genre that places red herrings to throw us off our guard rather than slide under our skin. The horror elements in “Jack Goes Home” fail to frighten in action, and when considered in retrospect, they’re insultingly cheap and appallingly lazy, a collection of parlor tricks deployed in a movie that overstays its welcome by 20 minutes.
Trimming the film’s manipulations and inessential qualities would only improve it, but judicious editing would leave very little meat on its bones. Jack’s first-born child is on the way, as we learn toward the beginning and are reminded near the end, but Dekker neglects to incorporate his protagonist’s impending fatherhood into his overarching exploration of relationships between children and their parents. Meanwhile, Shanda and Duncan feel so utterly detached from Jack’s inner and outer conflicts that they hardly matter to Dekker’s plot. The end result is that “Jack Goes Home” reads as inconsequential in total; it’s a picture composed of too much superfluous material and not enough ballast. [D+]