When Maria (Nilam Farooq) shows up 37 weeks pregnant at the attractive but remote country home of her husband Viktor (David Kross), you sense immediately that no good can come of this. If a character is pregnant in a film, it’s about even odds that said pregnancy will function as a way to increase their vulnerability – though not all films take this as far as this nifty little low-budget horror movie from talented German director Thomas Sieben, which combines the haunted house subgenre with pregnant-woman-in-peril to nicely nerve-jangling effect.
Occult horror always needs a starting point, a first evil from which the later ghosties and bumps in the night derive. Some films take as their inciting incident a broader historical crime or atrocity and it’s into this category Home Sweet Home falls. The Herero and Nama genocide, conducted by imperial German forces against indigenous people in what is now Namibia, was the first genocide of the 20th century, and is the basis for subsequent terrors visited upon our heavily pregnant heroine. Paying a price for the actions of previous generations is a big theme in German horror, but by looking to an earlier period than the horrors of the Nazi regime, Sieben reminds us that genocidal white supremacism was not invented in the 1930s.
Not that the film is overly preoccupied with delivering a history lesson: it’s more about present day chills as we watch Maria work out exactly what kind of danger she and her unborn child are facing. This she does at a credible pace, avoiding the traditional pitfall whereby the audience are so far ahead of the character in deducing what’s going on that we lose some empathy for them. Aiding this, Home Sweet Home is shot in a single take, or at least stitched together to give that impression; this undoubtedly helps with the sense that everything is unfolding in real time. At a lean 87 minutes, there’s no feeling that Maria is taking too long to wake up and smell the intergenerational malediction; rather, it’s impressive that someone that pregnant isn’t asleep by 7pm, ghosts be damned.
• Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives is on digital platforms from 30 September.
