Paranoia Sets into Ursula Meier's Home

Comments (0) By Andrew Schenker Tuesday, Nov 24 2009

Jerome Prébois

Home, creepy home.

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Home

349 5th Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11215

Category: Restaurant > Sandwiches

Region: Park Slope

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Home
Directed by Ursula Meier
Lorber Films
Opens November 27, Cinema Village

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The opening scenes of Home—a nighttime game of street hockey, a bathing session that turns into a five-way splash fight—establish the anarchic sense of play that defines the interactions of the film's central family, while the casual nudity on display hints at the vaguely incestuous tensions in this uniquely insular clan. The rest of Ursula Meier's confident, appealingly bizarre theatrical debut subjects these tensions to the hothouse environment of a self-willed isolation. When the five members of the central family find their remote domestic paradise invaded by the reopening of the abandoned highway adjacent to their house, they resort to increasingly lunatic measures to block out the noise—it's but a small step from earplugs to bricking up their house entirely. Eventually, paranoia and open hostility set in as a family defined from the start by too great a sense of closeness is forced into even closer proximity. Working with all-star DP Agnès Godard, Meier effectively communicates the sense of upended privacy, moving easily from the nighttime intrusion of brightly clad construction workers (the eye-straining oranges and yellows of their uniforms registering as a truly alien presence) to the incongruous sight of Isabelle Huppert tending her garden as blurry streaks of traffic zip by.