Coming Home in the Dark (2021)
Directed by James Ashcroft
A school teacher is forced to confront a brutal act from his past when a pair of ruthless drifters takes him and his family on a nightmare road-trip.
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What critics compared Coming Home in the Dark to
It recalls the ominous Lake Berryessa murder scene in David Fincher's Zodiac and has all the unbearable energy of Michael Haneke's Funny Games .
The pointedness of the film’s aims means it trades out the unnerving ambiguity of its undeniable cinematic forerunner—Michael Haneke’s Funny Games—for a more straightforward pulpy didacticism, making the subsequent desensitizing effects of the violence an unintended outcome rather than the entire point.
Adapting Owen Marshall's short story of the same name, first-time feature director James Ashcroft appears to be taking cues from Austria to begin with, however, and fashioning Coming Home in the Dark after Michael Haneke's two versions of Funny Games.
One such offering, Coming Home in the Dark, is a deeply unsettling bit of Ozploitation (although it’s actually from New Zealand, so Kiwiploitation?) that begins like a distaff version of Haneke’s own Funny Games by way of Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek.
In Haneke’s Funny Games , Peter and Paul were free-ranging sadists, playing with holidaymakers ostensibly to pass the time.