The Home

Aging gracefully should not include watching The Home, a lackluster horror exercise as generic as its title.

This uninspired thriller from director James DeMonaco, best known for helming The Purge and two of its sequels, ditches much of that franchise’s anarchic spirit and underlying social commentary in favor of a rather straightforward saga of outrageous conspiracy theories and bloody revenge.

It lacks the subtlety and surprise to generate consistent suspense, instead relying on jump scares and creepy atmosphere to conjure its scattered frights.

It’s set almost entirely inside an East Coast nursing home during hurricane season, where twentysomething Max (Pete Davidson) is serving out community-service hours as a janitor and resident aide.

The opportunity, arranged by his foster dad (Victor Williams) and the facility director (Bruce Altman), is perhaps a final chance for Max to get his act together after a string of arrests, most recently for graffiti and trespassing, as he’s still haunted by childhood trauma and transgressions.

Yet beneath the surface normality, he senses something is amiss. For example, Max is issued a vague yet stern warning on his first day about staying away from the fourth floor. “Those patients need special care,” he’s cautioned.

Still, Max tries to be optimistic, and the residents are eager to welcome him, especially an ebullient theater actor (John Glover) and a woman (Mary Beth Peil) who shares his artistic sensibilities.

Eventually, persistent nightmares and hallucinations trigger a surreal odyssey that connects the sinister forces lurking in the building to his own troubled past.

Davidson (The King of Staten Island) continues to diversify his acting career beyond his comedy roots with mixed results. In this case, there’s not much depth to the character, either via the script or his performance, to yield a deeper rooting interest along Max’s road to redemption.

The meandering screenplay by DeMonaco and actor Adam Cantor is driven by his desperation and his ignorance of the red flags around him. It winds up as little more than an incoherent parade of genre cliches.

For Max, survival requires more than simply escaping beyond the institutional walls. Meanwhile, The Home tries to rescue itself by unspooling a bonkers final-act twist that reveals a willingness to not be taken so seriously. By then, it’s already been pronounced dead.

Rated R, 97 minutes.