Review: The Humans Is a Finely Tuned Family Portrait Draped in a Pall of Horror

A talky family drama that takes place almost entirely within a rundown, pre-war duplex in Chinatown, Stephen Karam’s adaptation of his own Tony-winning play The Humans is laden with malevolent portent from the start. Even before anyone in the film speaks a word, we’re jolted when a shockingly loud thump disrupts a quiet moment of reflection by Erik (Richard Jenkins), the patriarch of the Blake family. Such strange noises from the apartment upstairs—occupied, we’re told, by an elderly Chinese woman who doesn’t speak English—serve as a kind of leitmotif throughout The Humans, disrupting and undercutting this family’s superficially jocular banter as they endure a tense Thanksgiving dinner in daughter Brigid’s (Beanie Feldstein) eerily unfurnished apartment.

Brigid shares her dingy new digs with her seemingly unflappable boyfriend, Richard (Steven Yuen), who handles the cooking while the Blakes chatter about everything from the perils of big city life to the crushing effects of student loan debt. Karam has an impeccable ear for the lived-in rhythms of family patter, as well as its passive aggression and casual cruelty. He understands the way that recurring jokes, often at the expense of a parent, can be used to express affection just as easily as exasperation. For one, the way that Brigid and her sister, Aimee (Amy Schumer), take aim at their father’s fussy practicality contrasts with the cutting pot shots they take at their mother Deirdre’s (Jayne Houdyshell) religious convictions and struggles with her weight. If the daughters’ light jabs at Erik speak to their love for his dependability and support, their pokes at their mom are pregnant with built-up resentment.

As the night wears on, it’s revealed that each character is navigating some tribulation in their life. Aimee has just been pushed out of her job at a law firm, has recently been dumped by her longtime girlfriend, and is dealing with a nasty gastrointestinal condition. Brigid, who works as a bartender, is facing one rejection after another in her bid to become a professional musician. The seemingly cheerful Richard has spent much of his early 30s struggling with deep depression. And Erik has been experiencing haunting nightmares, hints of a deeper cataclysm in his and Deirdre’s life that will be revealed only near the end of The Humans.

Karam orchestrates the highs and lows of a family reunion with Chekhovian subtlety, allowing the suppressed sorrow of the Blake family to seep out through quiet conversations and telling moments rather than exploding in bursts of O’Neillian speechifying. If the script at times strains for significance, particularly in its slightly awkward invocation of 9/11, Karam ensures that the focus remains on his characters and their relationships, rather than on any grand themes. The cast—which also includes June Squibb as Momo, Brigid and Aimee’s senile, wheelchair-bound grandmother—deliver finely shaded performances that never lapse into the sort of showy emotiveness that so frequently plagues stage-to-screen adaptations.

In translating his own work to film, Karam has decidedly avoided “opening up” the piece, opting instead to home in on the play’s crumbling, claustrophobic apartment setting, which he treats as a kind of spooky haunted house. Cinematographer Lol Crawley’s camera lingers on the cruddy details of Brigid and Richard’s new home (the water-stained ceiling, cloudy windows, ugly exposed piping, and toilet seat held together with duct tape) as if they were omens of some imminent apocalypse. Dialogue scenes are shot from obstructed distances as if viewed by a ghost haunting the decrepit building. In the film’s most expressionistic touch—one carried over from stage productions of the play—the light bulbs in the apartment go out one by one, eventually engulfing the characters in near-complete darkness.

All these stylistic flourishes start to feel like an unwelcome, even arbitrary, imposition onto the finely hewn naturalism of the script. Karam’s story is one of deep moral crisis, not things that go bump in the night. By utilizing the vocabulary of horror cinema—including a shot cribbed from Roman Polanski’s Repulsion—Karam may successfully heighten the tension a bit, but it often comes at the expense of the film’s nuanced depiction of a strained yet resilient family unit. Rather than drawing us deeper into the Blake family’s dysfunction, all these loud noises and shadows ultimately do little more than obscure the characters from us. Literally.