Home Movie

The Poes are your average, middle-class American family, living in a remote area of upstate New York. Clare (Cady McClain) is a psychiatrist. David (Adrian Pasdar) is a Lutheran minister. Ten-year-old twins Jack and Emily (played brilliantly by actual brother and sister Austin and Amber Williams) are out of their minds. Clare recently bought a video camera to document her sessions, but neither parent can resist co-opting it to use for home movies. Everything we see is limited to what they have shot of each other. And it isn’t pretty. Their footage at first seems fairly typical until Jack throws a rock into his father’s face. Shortly afterward, a tender moment is interrupted when Emily quietly kills a frog. Listening to the parent’s conversations, we begin to realize that the Poe children have always been violent. And it appears that their behaviour has lately been getting far more dangerous. After a particularly savage incident (trust me, it will freeze your blood), Clare tries to do home counseling with her own children as patients, but this fails miserably. Medicine fails. Religion fails. The children are utterly, irrevocably cruel—the very definition of the word “evil,” in fact—and there is absolutely nothing their parents can do except continue documenting their behaviour.