Home Sweet Home Alone is Great, Actually

The haters are wrong.

December 13, 2025

Home Alone is a holiday classic. It is at once a film about how creativity can overcome serious threats, but also about the importance of caring for those around you even if they’re annoying and stupid, and it’s also about how harmful it can be to judge strangers based on unreliable information. These are good messages for a Christmas movie to communicate to its audience, delivered by a film that is very fun and satisfying to watch.

Later Home Alone films—its beloved sequel, and the varyingly-maligned follow-ups—are all quite similar: a kid defends his home from burglars, usually during the holiday season. This begs the question: Why create a sequel if it’s just going to be the same movie again? Home Alone 2 amps up the action, both before and during the customary home invasion climax, but is otherwise the same film. Home Alone 3 does more to set itself apart, being something closer to a spy thriller than a formulaic sequel. For its numerous sins, even Home Alone: The Holiday Heist (the 5th in the series) at least manages to be conceptually interesting by giving its oddball lead character a mindset that perfectly fits the Home Alone formula.

Still, after five of these films—only the first two of which are well-regarded by general audiences—why persist, unless writers have found a way to use the same premise to create a very different viewing experience? Probably money, right?

Well, to quote Kevin McCallister: I don’t think so. Home Sweet Home Alone has much loftier ambitions than simply cashing in.

Now, I am not a student of film. The most I could tell you is how Dutch angles work. I think. What I do have however is a style of media literacy that—by sheer virtue of me loving a widely-panned film like Home Sweet Home Alone—must logically be distinct from that of the general audience.

That is to say, I’m pretty sure I saw a different film than everyone else. For one, despite many reviewers stating otherwise, the film is neither a remake nor a reboot. It’s a sequel to the first two Home Alone films, whose events are relevant to setting up this newest film’s antics, even though the element from the prior films essentially amounts to a cameo. I at least understand that a film acknowledging the events of its predecessors disqualifies it from being a remake or reboot, which many others seem to have failed to grasp.

Before I continue: I will mostly use plot points of the film as a way to discuss its dramatis personæ. I will not spoil the ending. If my description at any point convinces you to watch Home Sweet Home Alone, then go watch! This post will have already served its purpose!

The film opens on Max Mercer, pleading to his mother Carol to find somewhere to use the bathroom as they drive through a suburb (a difficult task). The two find an open house, managing to successfully play themselves as prospective buyers, where Max goes about his business and the two later become somewhat acquainted with the owners, Pam and Jeff McKenzie. Max finds a defective doll in storage, to which Jeff makes an awkward joke. Carol disregards the indignity inflicted upon her son, and the film lingers for a moment on a visibly angry Max. Once the two parties part ways, the film then splits its screen time between the Mercers (focused mainly on Max), and the McKenzie parents. The McKenzies are selling their family home due to financial stress, and later that night as Jeff appraises the value of various possessions and discovers the solution to all of his problems: the aforementioned defective doll is one of a very limited quantity, which last sold for $200K at auction. He goes to retrieve the doll, but it’s missing. His conclusion: Max stole it. Cue the titular conflict.

If you’ve watched a Home Alone movie, you’ll probably understand what it means for the film to focus on a particular kid, and on a few antagonistic adults. The adults will burglarize the child’s home, and they will be repelled by means of guerilla home defense.

What sets Home Sweet Home Alone apart from its predecessors is its burglars. They are an entirely ordinary couple in a very difficult situation, who are largely unwitting in their role in the Home Alone formula. In fact, I would describe them as the film’s protagonists—it’s their story. Knowing this, you sould expect that the customary home invasion segment would play out very differently if the burglars are sympathetic. Where this part of the film is cathartic in earlier entries, here it is harrowing. Despite being the shortest home invasion in the series, it feels much longer because it’s just so hard to watch characters you care for suffer in that way. The catharsis instead lies beyond, and it’s brilliant.

The magic of Home Sweet Home Alone is that by flipping the perspective while still using the same formula, the film hits completely different notes than any of its predecessors. This is why some parts feel awkward, why it may feel unsatisfying if you’re expecting it to retread the same ground, but also why it has emotionally resonant moments that you’d never find in earlier Home Alones. As someone who grew up watching the first three Home Alone movies, I love Home Sweet Home Alone because of what it adds to the series. If you skipped this movie under the assumption that it was a cash grab, I recommend giving it a try. If you’ve already watched the movie and found it wanting, I hope my explanation helps you to appreciate the movie in a new light and even convinces you to give it another go.