Erik Blake has gathered three generations of his Pennsylvania family to celebrate Thanksgiving at his daughter’s apartment in lower Manhattan. As darkness falls outside and eerie things start to go bump in the night, the group’s deepest fears are laid bare.
Люди, 더 휴먼스, 人类, Lidé, בני האדם, A Blake család, انسانها, ザ・ヒューマンズ, Ludzie, Oamenii, Ľudia, Хората, Ljudi, Ljudje, Људи, Луѓе, 人類
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GUYS I'M HYPERVENTILATING
" In our family, we don't have that kind of depression. "
" No, we just have a lot of stoic sadness. "-
And sometimes families come together to pretend the ground isn’t crumbling beneath them because rituals demand that they do so.
Beautiful and terrifying in exactly the right way. Makes me feel a little bit better about my own Thanksgiving.
While The Humans is genuinely engaging at times, for me, it never fully reaches greatness, bordering on it but never pulling me in enough to really interest me. Writer/director Stephen Karam's arty, melancholic screen adaptation of his Tony award-winning play, is painful in both a good and bad way. The anguish of the characters is aching and heartfelt but the way it drags left me feeling cold and quite frankly unmoved by it’s conclusion. For a film so concerned about humans, their fears, dreams, and connections to one another, Karam ends up doing the very thing he should be avoiding: isolating them to the point none of them feel rememberable, thus leaving me with very little to care for. I’m sure it’s a film others will love, but for me, The Humans left me underwhelmed and unsatisfied, sadly never pulled me in the way I had hoped.
Every film made in response to 9/11 is a horror film in one way or another, but none of them — from the unbearable simulation of “United 93” to the eerie found footage of “Cloverfield” and the chilling-that-this-was-nominated-for-Best-Picture-ness of “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” — have spoken the genre’s common tongue more fluently than “The Humans.” And yet, for a movie which opens with a thunderous jump-scare that it follows with another solid jolt every few minutes before ending with the year’s most pitch-black sequence of pure terror, the biggest shock of all might be that Stephen Karam’s debut feature is so conventionally scary in the first place.
A prestigious screen adaptation of a Tony-winning play is just not the…
Overcomes my usual qualms with play-based films by injecting some thought into the usage of camera and composition, The Humans (terrible title, btw) succeeds at the crucial task of making a one-location environment actually interesting over its runtime, somehow benefitting from the empty space that comes with a shoddy new apartment not yet filled with one's furnishings: there is nothing to these walls besides their sheer nakedness, bluntly baring to us the worn-down nature that comes with decades of life experience. And like the space that surrounds them, the characters in here gradually strip off all exteriority, what should be a festive holiday re-union gradually descending into castigation competitions, as all good Thanksgiving dinners tend to do. It's hard to…
Great performances, compelling ideas and solid comedy while still being so grim but it's just missing something to really drive it home for me
