Go Home - digging up the unsettling ghosts of childhood wartime trauma

Go Home is the story of Nada’s return to her grandparents’ in Lebanon after the war drove her family to France.  The house is long abandoned and misused by the neighbourhoods and tensions from the war still run deep in the present.

Go Home is a psychodrama that is focused on Nada’s conflicted feelings and suppressed memories about her childhood during the war. She is clearly traumatised without fully understanding why. She wants to restore the house to restore her grandfather’s legacy but also can’t really remember him enough to know what she is fighting for. The film has some interesting ideas about memory, forgiveness and legacy, particularly in the context of when terrible things have happened and have never really been resolved.

I liked the way that the film approached this psychological trauma by using horror tropes. The wintry spookiness and chillingly neglected home, combined with a clever use of sound led to an intense and unsettling atmosphere in which the drama plays out for much of the film. The fragmented flashbacks of Nada’s childhood act as ghosts slowly revealing the mystery at the centre of the film.

What lets the film down slightly is a bit of lack of context for why Nada has decided to come back now and why she had decided now is the time the house and her family’s reputation must be restored – it isn’t clear whether this is a random decision on a trip to Lebanon or if other things have driven here. The lack of context makes Nada a slightly alienating character rather than understandable or relatable. She is so determined to carry on against her family’s wishes and active rejection by the local community.  It sometimes seems she is only motivated by stubbornness (or because the plot of the film needs her to) than a clear motivation to be so determined in the face of such strong opposition.

Still, the film brings to life well how hard it can be to leave the past behind and how the actions of one generation can impact the next and the film is genuinely unsettling at times. It is a shame that in not developing Nada as a character further that it didn’t quite deliver the emotional punch that it needed to.