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(Available 24 December Exclusively on Curzon Home Cinema)
"The Humans"
Erik Blake (Richard Jenkins) 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. "The Humans" explores the hidden dread of a family and the love that binds them together.
A lot of the opening shots are done with an 18mm lens, which conjures something epic from this very mundane image of a person in an empty apartment, like Roman ruins from the specific angle we’re hiding behind.
The story takes place in just a handful of hours and goes from day to night. The tight-knit Blake family, long-time residents of Scranton, Pennsylvania, gathers in New York City to celebrate the holiday in the shabby Chinatown apartment of youngest daughter Brigid (Beanie Feldstein) and her boyfriend Richard (Steven Yeun). Parents Erik (Richard Jenkins) and Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell), grandmother Momo (June Squibb), and older daughter Aimee (Amy Schumer) share resentments, commiserate, laugh, and grieve as the evening together unearths uncomfortable, sometimes devastating truths. As the night wears on, eerie noises haunt the rundown building and the apartment’s lights fail one by one as each of the Blakes lays bare their deepest fears and most humbling secrets. Elements of psychological thriller, domestic drama, horror and black comedy come together as the 'Thanksgiving' dinner veers from festive celebration to family squabble to poignant confessional in a deft exploration of the lurking economic, emotional, and existential fears of an unraveling 'American Dream'.
"The Humans" takes place almost entirely in Brigid and Richard’s apartment, which is labyrinthine and disorienting. The story is so much about the unspoken anxieties of this group of people; visuals could communicate so much without dialogue. The other priority is to create distance at the start, to start the film as voyeur of the family and by the time we’ve come to know them well at the pig smash, we’re literally closer, we’re sitting at the table with them. The framing of the shots is very specific and contributes to an atmosphere of both claustrophobia and intimacy. There’s a lot of complicated business going on, cooking, eating, fiddling with the lights or cleaning, that's presented both front and center and in the background. The film presents the relentless anxiety of the modern age with haunting visuals inspired by classic cinema and fine-art photography, all inside a meticulous recreation of a Manhattan prewar apartment. "The Humans" is a nuanced exploration of the hidden anxieties and fears of an American family and the love that binds them together.
"This Humans" is inspired by tropes from the horror and psychological thriller movie genres. The films of Edward Yang, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Krzysztof Kieślowski really helped put together a unique cinematic language for the film and create a visually oriented screenplay. "The Humans", like a lot of Kieślowski’s work, sits in a world where the possibility of both the ordinary and the numinous hang in the air. All of these things come together as we follow the private life of a family, watching people spill in and out of the frame, seeing people through doorways, half-hearing conversations. The film is interested in sounds like the hum of a refrigerator, how the noises are connected and what that blend would sound like. It's not about 'Halloween' horror floor creaking. The family’s financial struggles seem to resonate to any people from a certain economic class that have been overlooked. You can viewed the story through a political lens, a response to Trump’s election. It's a kind of literal political rhetoric.
Stories about fear are popular because we like to sort of creep into someone else’s basement and look at things other people are struggling to deal with. On some level, that can make people feel less alone. On some level when you’re not telling a story about a group of people solely to celebrate them or to lift them up as the example of how to be a family, you leave a lot of room for people to process their own joys and terrors and highs and lows, their own ideas about what love looks like. And sometimes it could be those political discussions. That can be a reminder that finding the political via the personal is not just viable, but perhaps in some ways a more enduring way to do it. You don’t have to write something about Hillary Clinton or Trumpism. You can say more just by showing real people and their lives, their imperfect lives.
