106 min | R | November 24, 2021 | A24
A family gathers in a crumbling New York duplex for Thanksgiving dinner. The walls knock, the lights die, and the people inside slowly admit what they have lost. The scariest thing in the apartment is the truth.
Erik and Deirdre Blake drive into Manhattan to spend Thanksgiving with their daughter Brigid and her boyfriend Richard. The young couple has just moved into a run-down pre-war duplex in Chinatown. Over one meal the family unpacks its debts, its illnesses, and the secret Erik has been carrying. The Humans presents itself as a holiday drama and operates as a horror film. The real subject is the American family discovering that the floor underneath it has rotted through.
Richard Jenkins plays Erik as a man trying to hold his face together while it falls apart. He flinches at every noise in the building and Jenkins makes the flinch read as guilt before fear. Jayne Houdyshell plays Deirdre with a brightness that keeps curdling into grievance about money and weight and her children’s indifference. Amy Schumer plays Aimee, the older daughter losing a relationship and her colon to illness, and she strips out every reflex toward comedy. Beanie Feldstein plays Brigid as the host who needs the night to go well and watches it refuse. June Squibb plays the grandmother Momo as a woman erased by dementia who still erupts into terror.
Stephen Karam directs his own Tony-winning play and shoots it like a haunted house. He keeps the camera at a distance and lets characters drift out of frame so the audience strains to find them in the gloom. Lol Crawley’s cinematography buries the duplex in shadow and stains the walls with damp, and the two floors connected by a spiral staircase become a body with a sick gut below. The sound design carries the film. A thud from the upstairs neighbor, a popping light bulb, and a groan in the pipes land with the force of a jump scare because Karam withholds any music that would tell you how to feel.
The Humans understands that the dread in a family is not an event. It is the accumulation of small confessions across a single table. Karam stages a Thanksgiving where nothing supernatural happens and every frame insists that something is wrong. The horror grammar is not a gimmick laid over a domestic story. It is the honest form for a film about parents who worked their whole lives and arrived at fear. Karam trusts the dark, and the dark delivers.