Home Education

A teenage girl’s belief in being able to bring her father back from the dead is fostered by her mother’s teachings and a strange, macabre ritual which she performs in the depths of the forest.

Rachel’s (Page) upbringing has been a little different from the normal, to say the least. Moved out to a smallholding in the rural Calabrian countryside, where her father has followed his career as a butcher, she is home-schooled by her mother (Ormond) in some pretty iffy biology basics, as well as a few other things. Rachel has also been taught, by her father mostly, that she is special in a very certain way. With practice, Rachel has learned to call into the other place – ‘There’ – and can see into the extra plane where the dead things are. Now that her father has joined that other place, her special talent is needed more than ever, to call him back to the living and go on pretending like nothing ever happened.

So, once lessons are over, Rachel pops off into the woods with her big overcoat, satchel and bone death whistle, which she calls a horn. Blowing the horn around the forest calls out to the dead things, and Rachel reaches into the void to hear their cries, trying most of all to hear her father. When local vampire-goth heart-throb, Daniele (Fasano) starts poking around in the forest, too, a conflict of interest, or a glimmer of doubt, begins to become a real threat to the concentrated thought Rachel needs to complete the ritual.

The Home Education we are being offered by writer and director, Andrea Niada includes some blind repetition, some ritualistic chanting, and a whole load of psychological horror, with a splash of teen angst thrown in for good measure. We are invited to learn alongside Rachel, with Julia Ormond looming large as our Mother Superior and teacher, as we try to reach through the blackness to pull someone we love to safety. Ormond fills the screen with her presence and plays a strong matriarchal role perfectly, while Lydia Page is just as strong as a doe-eyed Rachel, evolving along with her character as she realises her own knowledge and power.

There’s a lot in Home Education that comes from the stock school of low-budget horror films. From the lead in we’ve got an isolated homestead out in the back of beyond; there’s the overhead drone shots of the lonely road through the trees; and more overhead shots just of the trees themselves; then there’s some creepy, low tones alongside minimal dialogue; and finally the inevitable incursion of an astral plane into this one. But once the set-up is done, Home Education takes a leaf out of its own book and creates a distinct and original world to inhabit with its cosmic horror. Rachel’s situation feels akin to Misery (1990), or to little Danny in The Shining (1980), with Niada managing to avoid direct comparisons due to some truly original storytelling, whilst also managing to avoid direct Twilight (2008) comparisons in the same way.

There’s strong production value all throughout Home Education, with filming and production taking place in Italy, where it went on to become the biggest grossing home-grown horror debut, ever. Niada is very well supported by a talented crew who help set the scene and paint the picture along with her, creating two opposing but equally believable worlds which cross-over in front of our very eyes. There’s some striking imagery in Home Education, along with some deep-seated themes which could provoke a lot of discussion long after the film is over. What it needs now, is a distributor for the UK and hopefully the rest of Europe, so that it has a chance at being seen, and people can gain the opportunity to have these discussions for themselves.