(courtesy IMDb)
You know what they say – you should never go back.
But while that can be sound advice, since where you go back to can never be exactly where you left (with all the attendant disappointment that can cause) sometime you don’t have much choice in the matter.
Anni (Hanne Skille Reitan), the protagonist of romantic comedy Home (Heim) definitely has lost and all agency when a meltdown live on the most popular kids’ program in Norway, triggered by a massive fear of water and swimming, sees her engage all kinds of distinctly non-G-rated behaviour and language.
If you know anything about mental health issues, the way Anni responds to a place of real fear and vulnerability makes absolutely perfect sense; push someone too far and they can’t help but shed all the defensive and coping mechanisms and succumb to a primal need to protect themselves.
But it doesn’t fit the squeaky clean image of children’s programming, and fair enough too, and so Anni is suspended, leaving her with little to no choice but to head home from Oslo to the small city she fled as a teenager, ostensibly because it was dull and boring but, as we see later on in Home (Heim), for a whole raft of other grief and trauma-saturated reasons entirely.
Her freewheeling, loving mother Mette (Evy Kasseth Røsten) is happy to see her of course, and like everyone else in the town of Steikjer (reportedly the home town of director Julie Skaufel) like old childhood friend Kjell (Hermann Sabado) and goofily quirky old employer Odd-Bjørn (Øyvind Brandtzæg) knows exactly why she’s home, thanks to scarring universality of viral video.
There’s no escaping the massive walk of shame Anni has to engage in, and at the start of unasked for and vehemently disliked exile, she is reminded of what happened to her over and over and over again.
A prickly mess of regret and recrimination, Anni picks fights with her supportive mum, who is well and truly living her best life, and her friends, trashing her hometown at every turn, furious at a place that seems to have nothing to do for simply existing and being her only option when her life goes precipitously south.
But as Home (Heim) goes on in its quietly chaotic and often thoughtful humourous way, looking for all the world like a romcom-meets-girl-returns-to-her-hometown vehicle, Skaufel, who wrote the screenplay with Miriam Larsen and Magnus Lillemark, begins to peel back the layers and the film slowly but surely becomes something altogether else.
The romcom element and woman rediscovering her old teenage loves and hope for the future very much remain in place, fuelled by Anni’s decision to take up odd shifts with her old service station/dinner employer, Elvis-loving Odd-Bjørn where everyone including hunky unrequited love Erik (Lavrans Haga) drops in at some stage, but Home (Heim) begins to reveal a deep layer of grief beneath all the surface emotional scratchiness Anni is exhibiting.
Something quite traumatic went down years earlier connected with an old friend Ella (Vilde Wolan) and it is an event that Anni very much does not want to discuss or even think about it.
The nuanced and thoughtful insertion of palpable, lingering grief into Home (Heim) adds a whole other deeply substantial layer to the film which is, as romcoms go, a cut above the average already, thanks to its early established unwillingness to sugarcoat life and pretend that darkly difficult times in life are easily glossed over.
Anni effectively loses her job after melting down disastrously on live TV and there is no coming back from that and while other romcoms may have waved a magic wand and fixed everything with some narrative sleight of hand, Home (Heim) does engaged in such storyline-leaching frothy contrivances, and it is all the stronger for it.
It means that when the true source of Anni’s pain and phobia, for the two are inextricably linked, comes to the fore, we don’t experience any sort of tonal whiplash from lighthearted romcom to deeper excursion into the bleakest parts of being human because the movie has already admitted to how massively unfunny and horrible life can be.
It’s honesty on that front makes everything that follows feel richer and more impactful including Anni’s unexpected romance with [REDACTED], her reconnection with her childhood friends and her mother, her friendship with Odd-Bjørn and her struggles to transition from national star to cancelled has-been (maybe).
Home (Heim) might have a sense of quirk and fun, and it isn’t afraid to show it, but it’s also more than willing to balance that out, and it does it deftly and with flawless aplomb, with an admittance that life can sometimes be so terrible that our only response is to run and hide and pretend none of it ever happened.
But it also explores the fact, with great passion and liberating truthfulness, that eventually all of the pain and grief comes home to roost and we have no choice but to deal with it and ride the wave of messy shittiness that follows.
It might seem like an impossibly incongruent mix but Skaufel pulls it off beautifully, and you reach the end of Home (Heim) feeling as if you have lived every deeply affecting moment of Anni’s old and new life.
She earns every moment of the potential new future that lies in waiting at the end of Home (Heim) but even then, when the final act performs its expected redemption and rebirth arc, the film doesn’t gloss over how hard it can be to admit to massive errors of judgement and grief-propelled weaponising of past scars and pain.
Home (Heim) is an absolute pleasure and joy to watch, filled with the expected goofy humour and romance and “SHE DIDN’T!” moments of viral messiness, but it goes much further and deeper, offering up a thoughtful and nuance treatise treatise on the power of grief to decay and distort unless we own that it’s there, and how once it is dealt with, and it’s not easy and the film doesn’t pretend otherwise, there is freedom that sends you forward into a world defined not by loss but everything you have to gain.