Home

Very interesting and surprising film starring one of my favorite actress, Isabelle Huppert. The film describes the changes that take place into an ordinary family who lives next to a highway.One day the highway is opened, and still life turns into a nightmare.Each member of the family deals with the problem in a different way. All of them try to keep on doing the same things in their own way, but things go wronger day by day.The cast play such excellent roles that you can feel the anxiety as they do.I was asking myself during the film Why don't they leave ? But there are no answers, only questions. Enjoy the film and try to find why.

I think that film is full of metaphors whether the director has an aim like that. Mainly, I got the idea of "interventionism to private life". What if some people intervene to your life? Or what if "the state" intervenes your life? I felt a referral to "Big Brother" issue too! Also film lights the way for environmentalism issues. Another issue is "resistance to change". It shows what happens if you resist to change. Feelings of stay-cation and isolation results in craziness. Isabelle Huppert is again at the top of her role playing skills.There is an approach to unknown. None of us had thought living at the edge of a motorway but there are real people living like this. The film's strength is here I think. It shows us something that we see nearly everyday but did not touch or feel even once.

Great insight in EU way of working, the years it takes to built a highway. BUT In the comments i see the movie maker made 1 error: international viewers mostly do not know the way we work in the EU in such cases. If a road, like in this movie, is built, many laws are applicable and even more ways to protest to hold the work up may result in a delay for years. If not all '1000 and one' permits are met, the work has to stop, especially when in the middle of protected nature nearby living area's. The people are no squatters, it is their family home, the children where born there. The parable is great, to be cut off from your existence as you know it, even after years of getting 'warm to the fact this will happen'. This is 1 apart movie, not great, but not small to. Well played, good actors and casting. Different story, deeper meanings in that story. Eight stars ! (I like fast paced movies, ad this is not as fast as the newly built highway which has a big role in it)

Isabelle Huppert is a French mother of three, whose husband goes off to work in a big green diesel Mercedes estate. Their youngest is a boy, about 8. Then a girl, about 14, who's studious and questioning. Eldest is a late-teen daughter who wears as little as possible, chain-smokes and sunbathes in a bikini on a lounger in the garden, with heavy metal pounding from a ghetto-blaster.

This scenario and scene is featured and remains with us most of the time, in one form or another. Oh, except that their rather run-down shabby house sits right bang next to a motorway, that carries no traffic, except as the biggest car park imaginable for the family, who also use it as an extension to their property. They need to cross this bitumen desert to reach civilisation; work, shops and school for the kids.

One day, the boy sees trucks on the carriageway, whilst out on his bike. Soon after telling his father, who doesn't believe him, the motorway is resurfaced overnight. Radio reports say that it's the missing link in the national network and there's huge interest from the motoring public. The two youngest anticipate some new projects coming on.

What happens next is bizarre, believable and really rather frightening. And comical. By trying to live their (rather odd) lives exactly as before - crossing the road for school, shopping, bikini-sunbathing - all a few feet away from juggernauts and during a heatwave.

The way that the stakes against them get higher and naturally seem more bizarre, the more they try and carry on regardless, perhaps in the same way as if you tried to re-route an ant trail. Toward the end, you will start wondering where on earth all this can possibly lead to - I'm not going to spoil it for you!

I did think of one of Michael Haneke's early films when watching 'Home' that had this sort of 'in reverse' psychology, but which was decidedly cold, un-humorous - about a perfectly ordinary middle-class Austrian family, who coped - and then didn't.

You can, of course, take Swiss director Ursula Meier's fable as a comedy, or an environmental statement or a family drama, or all three. Being very different, it grabs the attention, without ever being ridiculous and somehow manages to sustain this element and story all the way through. It's also decidedly 'Continental', the bathing habits of the eldest daughter, naked and smoking in the bath listening to her Walkman, with the rest of the family chatting away next to her, mostly clothed. This - and other forms of a natural lack of inhibition seems healthy and refreshing, especially compared to our British straight- laced ways.

I give 9/10 as it's an ambitious film in both its audacity and originality and the fact that it gets away with it, becoming a sort of psychological horror. . .For a film to be so memorable is rare these days, although the title, unfortunately is. All the players, especially Huppert (naturally) are uniformly excellent and totally believable, as is their environment, which IS worrying....

Home is a very strange movie. It is a family with two teenage daughters and one young son living in the middle of a huge golden field of grass. A freeway opens right by the house. It gets noisier. The drivers leer. The drivers honk. The noise becomes non-stop. There is a traffic jam and people get out of their cars and stare. The family cannot deal with this and slowly go mad, cementing up the windows. The little boy is the only sane one in the movie. He handles all this as just so much adventure. One daughter is the sort you love to hate, full of herself, selfish, totally absorbed with her appearance, idle, rude. The other is just plain crazy. Mom and Dad are a very loving caring patient couple. It is a movie where the circumstances gradually deteriorate. I think of Roman Polanski's Repulsion for a similar effect. It is like a horror movie -- unpleasantness for the sake of unpleasantness. There are no murders or zombies, just frayed people who cannot cope with the situation. There is quite a bit of nudity, but I just put that down to a difference in the way the French view nudity within the family. It is not sexual. The ending made no sense to me. It just ended things in mid air without any sort of resolution. The whole movie left me queasy, and wondering if perhaps it were some great metaphor than went right over my head.

Kacey Mottet Klein who plays the little boy Julien is an amazing actor. Not once did I notice he was acting. He was completely believable. In one scene he begged his Mom to let him out of being locked in the bathroom. It was heart-melting. I could not stand that frail little character entombed with the rest of that wacko family.