In Ben Smallbone’s HomesteadWorld War III has just begun, or at least that’s what it looks like. Two men aboard a boat ignite a bomb and its effects reach the fancy home of a family in Calabasas, California. They’re forced to go on the run and told not to breathe the air. It’s the beginning of the end, as the film claims.Then the film is taken to a whole other place. A country homestead where a man has built himself a fort, complete with enough ammo to win in a standoff against… everyone. It’s the place everyone around tries to get to, including the family that has run away from their home which is now a grave. Homestead is the story of what happens after humanity decides to survive.
The opening sequence in Homestead is downright terrifying. It shows a family in distress and trying their best to react to something inexplicable that’s also quite familiar with what we’ve seen in other apocalyptic movies that try their best at showing the origins of the disaster. Nevertheless, the movie goes a bit further and digs deep into the real dynamics that we’ve already seen during the events that shook society. It’s all fictionalized to make our lead characters “win” but it will still give you the chills.
Homestead commits a bit of cinematic sin when it pushes its premise down a saccharine narrative, almost Hallmark-y, when it’s actually about humans trying to survive the potential end of the world. The characters, especially the young ones, are shown questioning the unnecessary during a time of crisis (some religious themes that seem atypical), as if they could forget they’re facing extinction. Perhaps this is me being a bit too tragic, but it felt unrealistic of the film to touch some subjects that are too family-friendly to tune with the story.
The film ends on a high note. A very high note. With a message of optimism so strong that you will look forward to seeing how it all continues; it’s the beginning of a series produced by Angel Studios. And yes, it sort of complies with what the “pay it forward” studio has designed in terms of storytelling. In the end, things get solved when one character has a change of mind, brought by his confrontation with death itself. He wakes up after miraculously surviving a rifle shot, and his wife narrates everything that happened while he was gone. It seems the species will not only survive. We will thrive if only we get a farm of that size with so many good people, infinite ammunition and the values of a very kind family. A mix between the ideal and a model of the end of the world that’s not exactly realistic.
Is it a bad film? Far from it. Homestead is just different in its approach to the end of the world, and our likely survival. It decides to get rid of the usually bleak of its kind of stories and goes for an entirely sweetened version of the apocalypse. There’s not anything wrong with that. It will just be a divisive feature among most of the viewers.
Film critic. Lover of all things horror. Member of the OFCS. RT Approved Critic.
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