Stephen Karam has adapted his Pulitzer-shortlisted 2015 play The Humans for the big screen to unnerving effect. Slowly, the purely Aristotelian conceit – a bickering family converges on a ramshackle duplex for Thanksgiving – gives way to a sense of festering entrapment. By the darkened final act, one half expects to learn that the entire haunting psychodrama has taken place inside of the head of the family patriarch. Or that perhaps everyone we have encountered is dead.
Composer Brigid (Feldstein) has moved into a crumbling new apartment in New York’s Chinatown with her boyfriend, an aimlessly perennial student, Richard (Yeun). They are joined by Brigid’s hangdog father Erik (Jenkins), mother Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell, reprising her Tony-winning role), senile grandmother Momo (June Squibb), and sister Aimee (Schumer).
Over the course of the day, there are small revelations and the kind of wounding, unacceptable insults that can only occur amongst family. Aimee, a lawyer, has lost her job and her girlfriend; Brigid has failed to secure funding. There are bigger bombshells to come. And yet these are dwarfed by endless references to money.
The apartment, meanwhile, increasingly and intriguingly doubles as a horror movie, one that seems to exist as an answer to Erik’s existential-sounding enquiry: “Don’t you think it should cost less to be alive?”.
Sure enough, the banging from upstairs simply cannot be explained away by Brigid’s assertion that: “This s New York; people are loud”. New York is not loud in this hermetically sealed space. The dripping, peeling, bubbling walls make for an increasingly oppressive cacophony. (Kudos to the entire sound department.) The lack of furniture, the fritzy electrics, and a space that – like The Shining’s Overlook Hotel – doesn’t entirely add up, menace the family just as certainly as if they had moved into an Amityville sequel.
These are lives blighted by the compromises of capitalism and recession. Defined by unacceptable compromise and disappointment, they are extensions of the janky apartment that surrounds them. Brigid’s excuses often sound awfully like the everyday justifications that unhappy people make for their unhappy lives. This is fine.
The ensemble remains electrifying against the damp. Jenkins puts in his best work since The Visitor, Schumer has never been better, and Houdyshell, whose character weathers endless digs about her weight and eating habits, is remarkable. Vox Lux cinematographer Lol Crawley finds creepy murk and contrasts. The darkness, when it descends, is impossible to negotiate.
