Home Bodies (2026)
Directed by Casey Walker
Screenplay by Adrian Murray & Marcus Sullivan
Starring Ian Ho, Emma Ho, & Ess Hödlmoser.

Sci-Fi

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

Another stellar world premiere at Fantasia 2026, Casey Walker’s Home Bodies is a smart sci-fi film about Red (Emma Ho) and Blue (Ian Ho), who live in an automated house that provides them food, necessities, and entertainment at the push of a button. Apart from each other, they talk to a voice they call Papa through a speaker outside a locked room. Then one day, Red and Blue are introduced to somebody new called Pal (Ess Hödlmoser), and nothing is ever the same for them again.

Home Bodies is a disturbing look at an automated world in which two children are indoctrinated into systems of control based in fear of authority and adherence to a binary, heteronormative world. Is Home Bodies about where we’re headed? Or is it a horrifying confrontation of exactly where we are at this moment in history? Regardless how you read the film, it’s a fascinating piece of science-fiction cinema with its finger on the pulse.

Control and automation are the centrepieces of Home Bodies. Papa, the patriarch, instils children with a fear of physical punishment, evident on the body of Blue who’s got a scar on his hand after they’re told: “There are consequences to breaking rules.” Papa generally controls the kids by keeping them in a bare, bland world, despite the home’s automation. Meals are numbered, not named, so when supper’s on the table one of the kids tells the other: “Third meal is ready.” Rooms are named “food room” or “toilet room.” Papa renders what ought to be a home into a house, raising the children in a place that might as well be a barn like the one in the tapes they watch every day.

The ‘smart home’ is already a reality and Home Bodies takes it much further, envisioning an entire existence automated via the home. Everything that’s required is replenished. All basic needs are fulfilled with little to no effort on the inhabitants’ part. Something Home Bodies does impressively well is deal with a world of instant gratification and what happens when that technologically constructed world begins to fall apart, particularly as it relates to kids. We can read the film as a parable of how kids are now growing up in a media-saturated, screen-dominated, surveilled world. Blue and Red’s carefully curated existence breaks down gradually as things stop working the way they did previously. In real life, adults in the 21st century live within the same cage of instant gratification as kids; for instance, the majority of adults, if their electric heat cut out, would probably never be able to build a fire, and, far worse, many adults can barely go 24 hours without an internet connection or they act like they’re living in the 1700s. When Blue and Red’s automated world starts to malfunction, their limited freedom starts to become painfully clear to them. Blue and Red represent two types of people: those who want to follow the rules blindly and live in an automated world without their own autonomy, and those who want to taste freedom, both from automation and control.

Home Bodies is a sinister metaphor about the indoctrination of children, especially their grooming into a binary world of heteronormativity. Pal’s androgyny gradually reveals the overall heteronormative indoctrination that Red and Blue have clearly experienced before the film’s events. Red naturally seems to call Pal “she” but Blue typically calls Pal “it” except for a key point in the film when Blue strategically uses female pronouns for Pal, albeit only for an extremely brief period. In general, Red and Blue live a binary existence of good v. bad, inside v. outside, and so on—Red being coded as a female colour and Blue as a male colour is a constant throughout—an existence only heteronormative conditioning can produce.

Home Bodies is a disturbing story that confronts how much human beings, and especially children, are susceptible to conditioning that makes them malleable and easy to control. We can consider the house in which Red and Blue ‘live’—if their automated, patriarchal existence can be considered genuinely living—a science fiction microcosm of our current world today, as we see our own lives increasingly forced towards automation, towards blind acceptance of power, towards control by artificial intelligence. There are times when Home Bodies is darkly funny, and even verges on satire, but it’s simply too scary a film to grin too wide at anything.