Elisabeth
Kübler-Ross would have to create a whole new stage of grieving for Jack
Thurlowe’s mother. It seems to mainly involve belittling her grown son.
Returning for his father’s funeral would be difficult for the mopey
twentysomething regardless, but there definitely seems to be some kind of evil
influence in the air throughout Thomas Dekker’s Jack Goes Home (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.
Thurlowe’s
hipster brooding is about to be interrupted by some terrible news. His father
was killed in a car crash that also left his mother Theresa injured. After
skyping his pregnant but not quite married girlfriend Cleo, Thurlowe leaves LA
for a very Upstate New York looking Colorado to tend to his mother and handle
his father’s arrangements. Viewers will quickly conclude the wrong parent died.
Theresa
does not have much time for polite conventions and she no longer seems to care
about Jack’s feelings. We soon get the sense there is something off about her,
well beyond the expected stress. Essentially, a cold war develops between them,
with several skirmishes fought over the family dog she evidently never liked. Things
really get tense when Jack gets the urge to investigate his past, starting in
the attic. Fortunately, Thurlowe’s life-long platonic lesbian pal Shanda also
came home to provide moral support. She was always rather intimidated by
Theresa, for reasons we can well understand.
Dekker
(previously a teen actor recognizable from Fox’s Terminator: The Sarah Connors and Gregg Araki’s Kaboom) would have a much harder time
slipping his big Shyamalan twist past the audience were it not for Lin Shaye’s
ferocity as Theresa. Poor Rory Culkin is basically walking into a buzz saw,
because he absolutely wilts under her stern glare. It might be Jack’s
homecoming, but it is her movie.
Daveigh
Chase also brings some earthy attitude as Shanda and Natasha Lyonne is quite
memorable in her extended cameo. However, Britt Robertson mostly gets stuck with
thankless skype scenes as the mega-preggers Cleo.
