Don't Leave Home Review

DON’T LEAVE HOME

Film Review by FIORE

Aye, laddies and lasses, what’s happening in the Emerald Isle?  Psychologists tell us when a society is in turmoil, the amount of horror and monster films increases.  The Irish have released four horror film in the past five months!  Something must be amiss.  

DON’T LEAVE HOME follows the template of Irish horror tales.  It is methodical in its plot and character development and as such, moves too slowly.  Like a bonnie lass, rambling onward with her red hair flowing, you just want to scream: “Get to the point!”

Can’t really blame Director and Writer Michael Tully because this is the MO for Irish horror films; he’s just following form.  The film is shot through hazy filters and low lighting, presenting a somber aura.

DON’T LEAVE HOME begins solid.  A priest in a small local town back in the 1980’s, paints a portrait of a little girl in front of a statue of the Blessed Mother in a grotto.  The morning after the family receives the painting, the little girl vanishes, and her image is also gone from the painting.  Weird stuff.

But, then the script falters.  It starts with a supernatural curse and ends with a greedy money scheme.   In the present day, a struggling artist Melanie Thomas, played by Anna Margaret Hollyman (one of the dreaded three name people) creates dioramas of Ireland’s famous missing people.  Her gallery show is lambasted by the local critics, but this doesn’t stop the reclusive priest painter Conor Callahan, played by Mark Lawrence,  from contacting Thomas and requesting a special commission piece.  She flies to Ireland, and there begins the dawdling unraveling of what happened some three decades ago.

When I was back there in seminary school, there was a person there who put forth the proposition that you can’t mix religion and science.  Yet, that is what Tully attempts in meshing devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary with the time space continuum.   It seems DON’T LEAVE HOME is alluding to some long lost Celtic mythos that evades the viewer.  This causes most of the ‘horror’ of the movie to be cerebral, rather than actual.

DON’T LEAVE HOME fits in well with the other Irish horror tales released this year, but it’s too plodding for non-Irish audiences.  There is no explanation given for the victims’ disappearance, nor the significance of the other world they travel to, though that may have required an unwanted religious tone.  Somehow, the Catholic religion is responsible for the abductions of innocents, though how and why are ignored.  This makes DON’T LEAVE HOME a film most likely enjoyed by folk who already hold a grudge against the religion.