Written for RAF News November 2021

When their youngest daughter moves to a ramshackle duplex in Lower Manhattan, the Blake family come over to celebrate Thanksgiving in full force – but the cracks are beginning to show.

Brigid (Beanie Feldstein) has just moved with boyfriend Richard (Steven Yeun) into the best place they could afford in the city. Out of towner parents Deidre (an incredibly precise Jayne Houdyshell) and Erik (a wonderfully preoccupied and safety-concerned Richard Jenkins) clearly haven’t come from money themselves and display a frugality that borders on hopelessness – at one point despairing that “it should cost less to be alive”. Amy Schumer gives an impressively real performance as Brigid’s sister Aimee, having been through a breakup and lost her job. And then there’s Momo (June Squibb), the grandmother whose dementia has her bound to a wheelchair that can barely fit through the doorway of the apartment.

Adapting his Tony award winning play for the screen, Stephen Karam crams his characters into the confines of a flat where the walls are covered in bubbled paint and water damage, showing us the detail of disrepair in frequent cutaways. Between the cramped hallways, and high ceilings, it almost needs to be filmed in a ratio more vertical. Instead most scenes are shot from neighbouring rooms, almost always framed by walls on either side. The claustrophobia is offset initially by the humour of the Blakes, who possess a familial nature that feels genuine.

That is until the jokes give way to the dramas underlying the evening – the secrets and judgements. It doesn’t matter what is said behind closed doors when the walls are so thin. With each personal revelation, and blown lightbulb, a tension builds to the point of horror – helped along by the sudden violent sounds of surrounding city life.

Settling us into the family dynamic with comedy, this familiarity is then turned in on itself, with the Blakes grinding on each other the way only a family can, even weaponising the words ‘Happy Thanksgiving’.

The Humans manages to be grounded in reality and yet is elevated to be cinematic – a film that feels fully lived in, with stupendous writing and casting to match.