The Funeral Home Review: A Creepy Home Visit

Release date: January 29, 2021
Running time: 85 minutes
Starring: Luis Machín, Celeste Gerez, Camila Vaccarini, Susana Varela, and Hugo Arana 
Written and Directed By: Mauro Iván Ojeda

Bernardo is an undertaker. He and his dysfunctional family live amongst coffins, wreaths and mischievous supernatural entities that visit daily. They attribute the paranormal manifestations to the dead bodies from their mortuary work. Finding the real source of all this madness will be their quest, but they might find a terrifying truth. 

The Funeral Home has a tense start that sets the dread early.  The family lives in a funeral home, which is already a place that is prone to creepiness, but the film really does a good job of layering it on thick.  From sounds, to creaks, to dark nighttime lighting and unexplained events, the nights in The Funeral Home are very well done.  And that is before any of the entities appear, which are also well constructed with a focus on practical, not computer generated effects.  The Funeral Home also does an amazing job of slowly building up the tension, with hints of the entities and the supernatural occurrences to really draw the viewers in.  And the movie is well acted, with good characters in this tense situation.  Machín is great as Bernardo, with his quiet, slightly submissive persona.  Gerez is also good as the scared but protective mother.  And Vaccarini quietly becomes the main character as she learns more about the entities and what is making them come out at night. 

However, once the Funeral Home starts to get going, it starts to weave some plot threads together that turn this interesting ghost story into a more complicated scenario.  There are revelations that occur that seem ignored, and some of the more bizarre aspects of that are hinted at the start just don't get explained.  There are some early interactions with the ghosts that just don't get dealt upon.  The main story thread is tense and will leave the viewers on edge, but the lack of clarity or even mentioning some of the side aspects just makes those seem like they were thrown in for shock value.  And the film also doesn't explain some aspects of its main thread.  It feels like some interesting scenarios that didn't quite weave together into a coherent story.  The movie is a well done production, but the story itself just doesn't live up to everything else about the film.  

The Funeral Home is a tense, creepy film with wonderful practical effects and enough atmosphere to keep you on edge. 

Rent it.

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The Funeral Home premieres in virtual cinema on January 29, 2021 and digitally and on demand on February 2, 2021.

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