REVIEW - 'This is Our Home' (2021)

I was asked to review “This is Our Home,” a horror/short appearing on the website Short of the Week by a colleague. It resides in the horror genre squarely, but also, I feel, in the satirical. Or at least that’s how I feel many people will take it. It features a mouse infestation in a shared apartment in New York City, and its conflict resides in how the place’s two roommates handle this. One is unemployed and loafs around the house; the other works at a restaurant and is a ‘bleeding heart vegan.’ The film’s conflict—and horror—comes from its music, score, and in-your-face ending. But I feel its quieter moments elicit its strongest messages. “This is Our Home” is what happens when idealism comes face-to-face with reality and crisis. The film’s main character, Dina, sells it to us well.

For a short film with an estimated budget of $15,000, “This is Our Home” has excellent production value. It’s not only the set pieces (we really feel that we’re in a tiny, gross NYC apartment), but the acting. Both Dina (Mor Cohen) and her roommate Ruya (Ruba Thérèse Mansouri) are skilled actresses. They bicker and fight. They get on each other’s nerves. Writer/Director A.K. Espada opens the scene with Dina asking politely (but we can tell the irritation in her voice) for her roommate to not use her pan without washing it, as she tends to cook items with animal products in it, and Dina is a vegan. It’s then that Ruya announces the super has caught another mouse in their apartment via one of these glue traps and disposed of it. Dina is horrified and wants to kill the rodents ‘humanely.’

Values Under Attack via Practicality

And this sets up the rest of the short. Dina soon becomes obsessed with the suffering of these creatures while Ruya sits on the couch, unconcerned. The film opens with an announcement that ‘no animals were harmed during filming,’ but that ‘real videos of animals in distress are shown.’ Dina puts her ear to the wall and imagines she hears mice (“Every apartment in NYC has mice,” she argues). But then the film cuts to a view inside the wall, then to a mouse burrowing, and then to what we assume is a YouTube video of a mouse caught in a glue trap, a man narrating unsympathetically how the mouse is ‘not dead yet’—the implication that he will soon end its life without thought.

A.K. Espada paints all sorts of inconsistencies in Dina, however, and at times I couldn’t tell if she was using her as a horror prop or making fun of her. Maybe it was both. ‘Bleeding hearts’ are easy to mock—in film and in life—due to their stalwart and deemed ‘irrational’ nature. Life is messy and you can’t protect everything all the time. Dina wakes up in the middle of the night and feels a mouse in the sheets with her. She quickly whacks it with a book, then cowers into shame. She finds a mouse under her bed, in a glue trap, and mercifully breaks its neck, not just to let it be thrown in the trash, alive, as her super had done. There’s horror in what she’s doing due to her value system, and Espada shows the struggle well.

High Production for a Low-Budget Indie

The film is enhanced by its score of shrill violins and anxious beats, as well as its colorization of darkened corridors and red-tinted hallways. We never see outside the house; we’re not supposed to. There’s also the irony that Dina works in a restaurant. We see her often in an old-fashioned diner apron, and I wondered at the conflict of serving animal products all day only to come home and make her best effort to be vegan.

There’s mice in them there walls… (Photo: Submitted photo, via Imgur).

But what “This is Our Home” highlights is the decaying nature of Dina’s mind and her sanity. She can’t separate her values from their situation, and once she breaks one mouse’s neck all bets are off. She comes home from work, exhausted, sits on her bed and eats a Gummy Bear (they have gelatin, made from bones, she has already educated us). The scene has horror and humor, and reminded me of a scene from FX’s “Nip/Tuck” in which a Jewish teenager rebels against his waning faith by eating a ham sandwich.

A Solid Indie/Horror Worth Checking Out

While the end of “This is Our House” catapults into the horrific and dramatic—especially its’ closing—its strongest moments are its value inconsistencies and its’ protagonist’s frame of mind. It builds its horror through music, lighting, and Cohen’s acting—who is very talented—and the double standards it builds up. You believe Dina’s consternation, and believe it can propel her into dark, horrific places. The ending isn’t expected and just works. Many people will likely view it as some kind of imagined or real revenge, but I liken it to Dina’s conscience. This is what she feels she deserves for her transgressions. Some may laugh at that; but to me—who rescues all manner of insects from my step daughter’s bedroom as to not kill them, I got it. And despite some tonal shifts, “This is Our Home” is a good production from Espada worth checking out.