Film review: The Humans brings haunting new shades to offbeat family drama
A rundown apartment’s heaving cracks and rumbling pipes take on a life of their own
A family tries to celebrate a makeshift Thanksgiving in a young couple’s broken-down apartment in The Humans.
The Humans is now streaming on VIFF Connect and other platforms, and screens at the Rio Theatre on November 30
ANYONE WHO saw the Arts Club Theatre’s excellent production of Stephen Karam’s The Humans in the “before times” of 2018 knows the decrepid New York City apartment setting went beyond being another character in the work. Set designer Drew Facey turned it into almost a living, breathing monster that loomed over the central family.
Karam takes that idea further in his hauntingly atmospheric and offbeat new film version of the play. His camera follows the rumbling pipes along the ceiling and zooms in on the heaving, cracking walls. The writer-director often shoots the family interacting from a room away, through the living-room archways, so that the subjects feel as removed as specimens in a jar. And when sad and withdrawn patriarch Erik Blake (the reliably compelling Richard Jenkins) stares out the grimy windows, the blurry figures he sees in the interior courtyard feel as ominous as ghosts.
The Blake clan has gathered in the aging apartment for a makeshift American-Thanksgiving dinner, complete with paper cups and grocery-store veggie platters. The not-quite-furnished Chinatown apartment is the new home for Bridgid Blake (Beanie Feldstein) and her boyfriend Richard (Steven Yeun)—who laugh off the trash-compactor eruptions and sinister bangs from the neighbour upstairs, even as the noises terrorize the on-edge Erik. He and wife Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell) worry about the safety of the apartment, while sister Aimee (a wonderfully drabbed-down Amy Schumer) is too distracted by her own health and relationship problems to care.
Adding to the disconnect is the almost hilariously impractical layout of the apartment, whose kitchen area sits in a windowless dungeon down a set of questionable spiral stairs. The difficulties of the space are emphasized right from the opening, when it takes 10 minutes or so to wheel Alzheimer’s-afflicted grandmother Momo (June Squibb) into the apartment’s tight corridor—a complex act of opening and closing the door and rolling her in and out of the corner.
The cheery surfaces of the gathering slowly give way to an elliptical plot that relies almost entirely on dialogue and claustrophobic atmosphere, coming to life through the hands of a powerful cast. There is love and laughter here; the family “drama” often comes in the minute ways siblings or parents and their kids can get at each other, speaking painful truths. There’s a palpable tension as Bridgid mercilessly teases her mother, as outsider Richard steps in to protect the older woman. Houdyshell, who starred in The Humans on Broadway, is a fascinating as she grows more irritated, her nurturing, cheerful front giving way to something more hurt and angry.
Don’t expect big conflict, only the banal secrets and resentments that rumble beneath surfaces, just like the water burbling through the building’s ancient pipes. This is a family that values a certain working-class stoicism—and leaves a lot unsaid.
The Humans is unusual and arty, but it’s also wincingly familiar. The central tension—of suburban parents (in this case, the Blakes come from Scranton, Pennsylvania) worrying about adult kids in the big city—feels universal.
But beyond that, there’s a vague sadness that pervades everything in this story. Karam was trying to get at the lasting trauma of 9/11, and the fears and insecurities it left in its wake. Yet that amorphous feeling of doom—not to mention claustrophobia—speaks just as directly to pandemic times. And the real-estate implications of a young couple putting up with a horror show of reno nightmares to acquire a decent-sized heritage space downtown? Let's just say Vancouverites will relate, big-time.
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