When Family-Friendly Chaos Crowds Out the Horror

Read Time:6 Minute, 30 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Forever Home
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Genre: Horror, Comedy, Supernatural
Year Released: 2023, 2026
Runtime: 1h 55m
Director(s): Sean Oliver
Writer(s): Drew Leatham, Sean Oliver
Cast: Sammie Lideen, Drew Leatham, Michael DeCamp, Alison Campbell, Cody Hunt, Shelly Boucher, Colleen Hartnett
Where to Watch: on UK digital now

RAVING REVIEW: A haunted house comedy doesn’t necessarily need to be scary to work. It doesn’t even need to be especially clever, as long as it knows exactly what kind of ride it wants to give the audience. What FOREVER HOME runs into is a different problem. It’s not short on ideas, characters, tone, or chaos. It’s carrying all of that at once, and you can feel it straining under the weight of trying to be too many different movies in the same body. There’s a version of this that could’ve settled into being a weird, spooky crowd-pleaser with a broad family-friendly streak. There’s another version that could’ve leaned harder into actual horror and let the haunted-house premise bite a little deeper. Instead, it keeps drifting between styles, never committing to one long enough for any of them to hit as hard as they should.

That doesn’t mean it’s a total wash. In fact, part of what makes the movie frustrating is that something likable is buried beneath all the tonal pandemonium. A young couple throws their savings into a home, only to realize they didn’t buy a fixer-upper so much as inherit a supernatural mess. That’s a strong starting point because it taps into anxiety in a way horror comedies often handle well. Buying a house is already terrifying, and FOREVER HOME has enough awareness of that to make the premise feel accessible before the ghosts even start making themselves known.

Sammie Lideen and Drew Leatham do a lot to keep the film watchable. Their chemistry gives the story an emotional center it badly needs, especially once the film starts stacking on side characters, the paranormal, and detours. They feel like an actual couple trying to make sense of a terrible decision, and that grounded dynamic helps when the movie around them gets stranger. You need that anchor in a film like this because without it, the comedy can start to float away from the stakes. Lideen in particular helps sell the stress of realizing that stability, romance, and death may all be sharing the same floor plan.

The supporting players are where the movie gets both its “spirit” and some of its mess. FOREVER HOME clearly likes eccentric personalities, and there are moments when that works in its favor. You can feel the film reaching for that offbeat, cozy, haunted-house chaos where the supernatural becomes less of a threat and more of an awful living arrangement. That can be fun. It gives the movie personality, and there are scenes where the humor lands because it comes from character friction rather than obvious, forced jokes. The problem is that the broader the ensemble gets, the more the film starts to feel like it’s bouncing from bit to bit, rather than building a clean progression.

That’s where the “kids movie but also horror” quality really starts to define the experience. There’s an almost R.L. Stine, after-school-special vibe to a lot of the film. The spooky material is often framed in a way that feels approachable rather than unsettling, and the lessons underneath the haunting sometimes feel larger than the haunting itself. There’s absolutely an audience for horror-adjacent films that function more like gateway material, or genre stories built around warmth, silliness, and mild creepiness instead of dread. But FOREVER HOME doesn’t stay there enough to make that identity feel intentional from top to bottom.

Instead, it keeps introducing elements that suggest a darker, stranger movie, then folding them back into something safer or more sentimental. That push and pull makes the whole thing feel crowded. It’s not that any one ingredient ruins the film, it’s that there are too many ingredients competing for the same plate. Haunted-house comedy, relationship story, ghost story, light supernatural chiller, oddball ensemble piece, soft family-friendly genre ride, broader adult comedy, bits of emotional sincerity, bits of chaos, bits of menace, none of it gets enough room to develop on its own terms. The film isn’t empty, it’s overpacked.

What saves it from being forgettable is its sincere streak. For all the genre teetering, there’s real affection here for these characters and for the idea of home as both sanctuary and trap. The film wants to be sweet. It wants to be funny. It wants to be spooky. It wants to wrap all of that in something accessible and heartfelt. I can respect that impulse even when the execution keeps getting in its own way. There’s enough personality here to understand why some viewers would find it charming, especially if they go in expecting something lighter, goofier, and more comfort-driven than the marketing might suggest.

FOREVER HOME isn’t bad because it fails at one thing. There are pieces of a fun gateway horror movie here, and there are pieces of a broader supernatural comedy that probably would’ve worked better if it had either simplified its emotional path or gone much harder into the absurdity. Instead, it sits in an awkward middle ground. Not painful, not worthless, not without charm, but too cluttered to become much more than mildly enjoyable.

That leaves it as one of those films where I can see the appeal more than I can really appreciate it. There’s heart here. There’s effort here. There are even stretches where the weirdness has a scrappy kind of appeal. But it feels like a movie with too many voices speaking at once, and not enough confidence in which one should lead. The result is a haunted-house comedy that never really becomes scary, never clicks as a comedy, and keeps brushing up against family-friendly genre territory without shaping that tone into something stronger or more distinct. FOREVER HOME lands right in that middle zone where I didn’t hate spending time with it, but I kept wishing it would pick a lane and make better use of what it already had. There’s a decent little movie hiding in here. It’s just buried under too much stuff.

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