Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

Home Blu-ray Movie Review

Home is where the heart—and the highway—is.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater July 30, 2010

The mosquito buzzing at night in your bedroom. A distant car alarm that won’t stop. That distracting hum from the back of your plasma TV. The incessantly barking cocker spaniel next door and the neighbor upstairs who wears lead shoes and apparently enjoys rearranging his furniture at three in the morning. The midnight drip…drip…drip of the faucet. Sound can be the ultimate aggravator, worming itself into your brain, expanding and exaggerating, fraying nerves and putting tempers on edge. And as those who live downtown or next to a busy road can attest, the non-stop drone of traffic is the worst. It’s not white noise—too many mufflers at different frequencies—and it can’t be drowned out. It’s enough to make you hate all motorcyclists, to curse truckers and possess a strong desire to throw a heavy object through the windshield of every car with a subwoofer in the trunk. Needless to say, the psychological effects can be devastating. Such is the case in French-Swiss director Ursula Meier’s feature debut, Home, which sets the dissolution of a family to a soundtrack of ceaseless highway noise.

They're coming...

At the beginning, though, everything is quiet. The titular home is a modest house in the middle of nowhere that sits immediately next to a disused freeway. The family that lives in the house loves its isolation; lawn furniture and toys are strewn across the four lanes of deserted blacktop, used as a makeshift front lawn. They have a bucolic, uninhibited existence here, and the broad swath of cracked and weed-ridden road that cuts through the surrounding countryside is the only reminder of a distant civilization they seem to have almost entirely abandoned. On the surface, the family appears impossibly happy—they laugh, play together, even bathe together—but there are visible cracks in the veneer of contentment.

We get a sense that the mother, Marthe (Isabelle Huppert), is perhaps unhealthily attached to the house. There are definitely mysteries to her past—which go pleasingly unexplained—and though she dotes on her son Julien (Kacey Mottet Klein) with obvious affection, her relationship with her two daughters is awkward and strained. Part of the film’s effectiveness is its ability to hint at psychological issues without being blatant. Elder daughter Judith (Adélaïde Leroux), a svelte lynx of a young woman, spends all day sunbathing. Marthe watches from the window. Is she jealous of her daughter’s body? Incestuous undertones make themselves quietly heard, as Judith certainly has no qualms about being naked, even in front of her father, Michel (Olivier Gourmet). Or, does Marthe simply wish Judith would get a job and be more productive? It’s all played with satisfying ambiguity. Younger teen Marion (Madeleine Budd), a shy math whiz, is the polar opposite of her sister, refusing to wear a bathing suit and preferring to spend the summer in sweaters. But she isn’t the only one about to be stifled.

The family’s internal issues heat up when a construction crew comes through to pave the highway. This happened once before, years ago—EU construction projects have a tendency to be oft delayed, apparently—and Marthe is holding out hope that the road won’t be re-opened. Of course, eventually, it is, and their once-peaceful, rural home is filled with the blaring sounds of constant traffic. At first, the family tries to make light of it—they wear earplugs and camp out together in the quietest room of the house—but the incessant noise and constant presence of cars slowly begins to take its toll.

Drivers honk when they pass at Judith sprawled out in her bikini. Traffic jams leave passengers leering inside the kitchen window. To get to and from school, Marion and Julien even have to crawl through a storm drain beneath the highway. Tensions grow taut, minor squabbles turn into violent arguments, and we get a feeling someone is going to get hit—by a car, a family member, or both. What happens, though, is much more bizarre. A renovation project to soundproof the house essentially turns it into a tomb, a sepulchral dwelling draped in plastic sheeting and sealed with cement blocks. The family’s previously pastoral home, where windows used to be perpetually left open, becomes a claustrophobic hell, hot and unventilated.

Ursula Meier calls Home a “road movie in reverse,” and it is. The typical qualities of a road film—movement, freedom, adventure, the possibilities of life—are completely upended here. The once-isolated home—a place that, in the middle of nowhere, seemed to be everything and everywhere to the family—is reduced to a stationary spot, a dot on the map of someone else’s travels. The family is effectively immobilized, and their attempt to wall themselves off from the outside world leads to literally and figurative suffocation.

You could read Home as a parable about the encroachment of civilization into the natural world or as a fable for the way external circumstances can alter the internal, emotional dynamics of a family, but the metaphors only work because the director and actors sell a frankly over-the-top scenario as something plausible and, even more so, dreadfully real. The film’s pacing, especially in the final act, is somehow both lethargic and urgent—like how your first instinct when being strangled is to frantically struggle, but inevitably you black out—and the acting is believable. Marthe’s motivations are sometimes suspect—since the film never tells us why she’s terribly attached to the house, it’s hard not to see her as incredibly selfish—but Huppert balances the loving mom/batshit mother dichotomy brilliantly in a performance that’s raw and emotionally unhinged. For a debut film, Home is remarkably assured, and I look forward to wherever it is that Ursula Meier will take us next.

Home Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Kino International brings Home to U.S. audiences with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer that's framed in the film's original 1.85:1 aspect ratio. The film makes a strong but understated appearance on Blu-ray, with an un-tampered-with look that does justice to Agnes Godard's evocative, naturalistic cinematography. Fine detail is more than adequately reproduced here, and you can easily discern facial texture, the threading in clothing, the knobbiness of a terrycloth towel, and even make out the individual blades in a waving field of wild grass. There are moments when the image seems a touch overexposed—I'm specifically thinking of the scene when the construction workers arrive, the highlights of their orange and yellow outfits slightly blown out—but otherwise color is very realistic, with strong tonal depth, even-keeled contrast, and solid black levels. Grain remains fine and stable, the print is nearly immaculate—I only spotted two or three white specks—and there are no overly apparent compression issues. (Although, some fields of color, especially the skies, look a bit blotchy.) I've got to give it to Kino—their Blu-ray output has been fantastic thus far, a massive improvement from some of their questionable transfers during the DVD days.

Home Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Since sound plays such a huge role in Home's story, I expected this disc's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track to be fairly robust. In a way, however, it's curiously restrained, although I still think that it's successful in ratcheting the family's ever-increasing tension. In the beginning of the film, before the highway opens, the mix is dominated by dialog, with only hushed ambience—crickets and airy wind, mostly—taking up residence in the rear channels. Once the roar from the freeway starts to intrude into the family's life, the front speakers get a wide spread with plenty of cross-channel traffic movement, but the rears stay conspicuously quiet. There's definitely room here for more engaging sound design, but I can't really dock this track for what was never there to begin with. Despite the limited immersiveness, the mix sounds strong—cars zip by in an ever-present drone, 18-wheelers roar with palpable LFE output, and when the soundproofing of the house begins, the track employs effectively ominous near-silence. Dialogue is clear and balanced throughout, and the optional English subtitles appear in easy-to-read white lettering.

Home Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

"Sleepless" by Ursula Meier (1080i, 33:39)
The best inclusion on the disc is Ursala Meier's second short film, from 1998, which won awards at several international film festivals. Do note that while the film is technically presented in 1080i, the image is windowboxed within the frame and obviously upscaled.

Interview with the Director and Cinematographer (1080i, 32:36)
In lieu of a director's commentary or "making of" documentary, we get an insightful conversation with Ursula Meier and influential cinematographer Agnes Godard, who discuss the origins and themes of the project, the difficulties in location scouting—they eventually found a perfect spot in rural Bulgaria—and the process of the shoot.

Stills
A classy, easy-to-navigate gallery with 19 high definition stills.

Trailers
Includes the trailer for Home (1080p, 1:43), along with a trailer for upcoming Kino release Ajami (1080p, 1:43).

Home Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Stifling, suffocating, paranoiac—Home is a grim examination of how external forces can alter the emotional dynamics of a family. Whatever you want to call it—environmental fable, character study, pastoral gone claustrophobic—the film is an exceptionally strong debut from director Ursula Meier, who coaxes yet another ravaging performance out of Isabelle Huppert and teams up with cinematographer Agnes Godard to paint an increasingly bleak family portrait. This is another great release from Kino, continuing their streak of bringing up-and-coming international directors to U.S. home video audiences. Strongly recommended.