Homewrecker Movie Review

Female friendship goes wrong when Michelle discovers that new gal pal Linda isn’t quite right in the head. Unfortunately, having only found this out once already inside Linda’s (surprisingly hard to escape) suburban home, Michelle faces a fight for her life in this life-or-death battle between the menopausal and the millennial.

There’s a simple setup to Zach Gayne’s tongue-in-cheek comedy horror (think Fatal Attraction meets Desperate Housewives) which is almost entirely reliant upon the chemistry between stars Precious Chong and Alex Essoe. Thankfully, its leading ladies are up to the task, and Homewrecker is an engaging game of cat-and-mouse between the two increasingly desperate women. The screenwriters (Gayne, plus stars Chong and Essoe) take full advantage of the characters’ generational differences and, although it could stand to be a little more scathing, is a fun indictment of the suburban Wine Mom.

The short 76-minute runtime flies by, and although the film is largely confined to one setting, it rarely drags or bores. There’s a nice sense of escalation to this battle of wits, building from one small macroaggression to the next, before culminating in violence and, uh, board games. Don’t go expecting the same level of gore and violence we got from 2018’s (vaguely similar) The Cleaning Lady, though. For all the good work he does as co-writer, Gayne’s action never hits home as it should, and his horror beats consistently fail to land. The slapstick violence is too light, too playful – the big gore gag messily executed. The film doesn’t really need it anyway, but it would have been nice if Linda could have felt like more of a threat. As it stands, she’s not too far off from Alan’s stalker in that episode of Alan Partridge.

Regardless, Homewrecker is a lot of fun. Its story is frequently amusing and inventive, and there’s a great musical needle drop for Linda before the finale. It’s smartly written and very well acted, with standout performances from Chong and Essoe. It could have stood to go a bit meaner and a lot darker, but this is a fun spin on the suburban stalker subgenre.