Beanie Feldstein and Steven Yeun in ‘The Humans’: Film Review | TIFF 2021

Existential dread has rarely felt so intimate and visceral as in Stephen Karam’s directorial debut, The Humans, adapted from his Tony Award-winning play. Very little actually happens in this real-time depiction of a family’s Thanksgiving celebration in a run-down apartment in New York’s Chinatown. Food is prepared and eaten, prayers are recited, secrets are revealed, and familial tensions rise to the surface. But for all its lack of overt narrative drama, the film is a remarkably insightful and powerful portrait of the human condition. Receiving its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, it should be a major contender at awards time.

Karam has done very little to open up his one-set, one-act play featuring six characters (another figure, mute, is seen from a distance). Within a basement duplex apartment, three generations of a family have gathered for a holiday celebration that requires some improvisation because the apartment is still largely unfurnished. Those assembled are lower middle-class couple Erik (Richard Jenkins) and Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell, repeating her Tony-winning performance), Irish Catholics from Scranton, Pennsylvania; their daughters Brigid (Beanie Feldstein), an aspiring composer, and Aimee (Amy Schumer), a corporate lawyer; Brigid’s boyfriend, Richard (Steven Yeun), who’s studying to be a social worker and waiting for his trust fund to kick in in a couple of years; and grandmother Momo (June Squibb), largely confined to a wheelchair and suffering from dementia.

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From the very beginning, writer-director Karam creates, sometimes subtly and sometimes not, an atmosphere of pervasive dread. The apartment is oppressive, its water-stained walls, peeling paint, narrow hallways, lack of natural light and filthy windows offsetting its physical expansiveness. A chair breaks immediately upon someone sitting in it, a toilet seat is cracked, lightbulbs burn out with alarming regularity, and loud, jarring noises from overhead seem to be almost supernatural in nature. The dilapidated environs seem to physically affect the inhabitants, who unnervingly keep spilling and dropping things. As brilliantly creation by production designer David Gropman, the setting is practically a character in itself and will produce shudders of recognition from anyone of limited means who’s apartment-searched in Manhattan.

Pleasantries are observed, and everyone seems to take the situation mostly with good humor. Except, that is, for Erik, who stares into space, silent, as if sensing approaching doom. He repeatedly warns Brigid that her apartment is in a flood zone and could easily become submerged if another Hurricane Sandy comes along. He has some personal experience with disasters, having narrowly avoided being killed on 9/11 while accompanying Aimee to an early morning job appointment in lower Manhattan. He would have made a tourist’s visit to the top of the World Trade Center, except that the observation deck hadn’t yet opened for the day.

Erik also makes clear to Richard, whose privileged upbringing he not so subtly disdains, that he and his wife are struggling to make ends meet. “Don’t you think it should cost less to be alive?” he asks, perfectly summing up financial desperation in a single despairing line.

There are plenty of other problems to go around. Aimee is suffering from an intestinal disease that may threaten her job, and her girlfriend has recently broken up with her. Momo, who needs Deirdre’s help to go to the bathroom, is mostly silent and uncommunicative, but occasionally erupts with nonsensical utterings and is prone to wandering away from her wheelchair. When the family sits down for dinner and Erik begins saying a prayer, Momo unexpectedly joins in, her eyes bright and speaking the words with perfect clarity. The other family members delight in her sudden burst of cognition, but the moment quickly passes and she tragically reverts to her walled-in state.

Communication among the group seems to be a problem in general, as they snipe at each other in the casually cruel manner so common in familial relations. Erik is disdainful of Brigid’s attempts at a music career, advising her, “You can always work in retail.” He’s even more disdainful of his wife’s fruitless attempts at losing weight, a subject that clearly causes her great pain. Eventually, secrets are unveiled that underscore how fragile the family structure can be.

Karam, delivering an unusually accomplished effort as a first-time director, expertly ratchets up the tension from the very beginning. The film’s technical aspects contribute greatly to the overall sense of unease, from Lol Crawley’s cinematography, which often features intense, Ingmar Bergman-style close-ups (at several points the camera almost seems to be heading up the actors’ noses) to Nico Muhly’s unsettling musical score (abetted by similarly bracing compositions by the likes of Philip Glass) to the unnerving sound design that makes the proceedings feel as much a horror film or psychological thriller as a family drama. It could be argued that the filmmaker errs toward excessive stylization, making the proceedings sometimes feel airless and unnatural. But the performances are so authentic, so lived-in, that we become fully invested in the characters’ relationships.

The acting is uniformly superb, with all the performers plumbing subtle depths and displaying a convincing familial chemistry. Jenkins brings a heartbreaking pathos and a tense restlessness to his role as the patriarch who’s worked all his life only to find that his efforts have largely gone for naught. Feldstein and Yeun convincingly convey the eager excitement of a couple starting their life together in a new home, even while they’re aware that the setting is less than ideal. Schumer displays a tart, comic edginess as the sister coping with life crises, and Squibb allows us haunting glimpses of the woman Momo once was. But it’s Houdyshell, the sole holdover from the original stage cast, who gives the film its beating, vulnerable heart. One of our most invaluable theater actresses, she’s too rarely been given the opportunity to truly shine in film, and she seizes this opportunity and runs away with it.