Overlook Dispatch: Abraham’s Boys and The Home

I’m covering the Overlook Film Festival remotely, bringing you dispatches on some of the most talked-about and uneven genre offerings from this year’s lineup. Next up are Abraham’s Boys, a restrained reworking of gothic legacy horror, and The Home, an institutional chiller that never finds its footing.

Directed by Natasha Kermani, Abraham’s Boys is a loose continuation of the Dracula mythos, adapted from a short story by Joe Hill. The film centers on brothers Max and Rudy Van Helsing, raised in isolation by their father Abraham, the famed vampire hunter whose paranoia and rigidity have shaped every aspect of their lives. Having relocated to rural California in an attempt to outrun the past, the family exists under Abraham’s suffocating rules and grim warnings about evil, legacy, and bloodlines.

As the boys grow older, they begin to question the truth of the stories they’ve been told and the increasingly erratic behavior of their father. Was Abraham a hero who saved the world from unimaginable horror, or a deeply damaged man who passed his fear down as doctrine? The film frames this uncertainty as its central tension, positioning inherited trauma as a kind of curse more insidious than any supernatural threat.

Abraham’s Boys is at its strongest when it leans into mood and implication. Kermani favors hushed conversations, shadowed interiors, and a pervasive sense of unease rooted in emotional inheritance rather than overt scares. There’s a solemnity to the film that suggests seriousness of intent, and its exploration of belief and abuse feels conceptually rich. Unfortunately, that seriousness often curdles into inertia. The film hesitates at moments that demand escalation, circling its themes without fully confronting them. What should feel like a reckoning instead plays as a prolonged standoff between suggestion and follow-through.

Thoughtful but frustratingly restrained, Abraham’s Boys ultimately feels like a film more invested in atmosphere than payoff. Its ideas linger longer than its impact, resulting in a work that’s respectable but underwhelming.

★★☆☆☆ (2/5)

Directed by James DeMonaco, The Home follows Max, a troubled young man sentenced to community service at a retirement facility after a violent incident. From the outset, the film gestures toward institutional horror: residents behave strangely, entire floors are mysteriously off-limits, and staff issue vague warnings rather than answers. It’s an inherently unsettling setup, one that invites commentary on neglect, aging, and the quiet cruelty of systems meant to provide care.

None of that potential is realized.

The Home introduces unsettling ideas only to abandon them without development or consequence. Scenes unfold without tension, scares fail to register, and narrative threads appear and disappear without coherence. The elderly residents are reduced to props rather than people, drained of specificity or emotional weight, which makes the film’s implied social commentary feel hollow at best. What should be an oppressive setting is instead inert, stripped of atmosphere and urgency.

Tonally, the film wavers between psychological thriller and supernatural horror without understanding either mode. Moments intended to shock arrive without buildup, and revelations land with no sense of impact. Performances are left stranded by thin characterization and an unfocused script that mistakes bleakness for depth. Rather than building dread, The Home feels oddly disengaged from its own premise.

Unlike films that falter while reaching for something ambitious, The Home feels uninterested in its own possibilities. There is no sustained tension, no compelling arc, and no payoff worth waiting for. It’s a hollow genre exercise that fails on every level it attempts to operate on.

★½☆☆☆ (1.5/5)