The Humans

You live in shit and then you fuck up and you continue to live in shit until you get dementia and lose your mind. Family is good though and 9/11 is bad.

The apartment was the creepiest part. Geez man, fix some of those mysterious stains.

Set in a dilapidated New York apartment that seems to decay before our very eyes, the gradual decomposition of the building echoes the rising tensions and anxieties of the family during their Thanksgiving visit. The performances are excellent, which is to be expected, but it's such a particular pleasure to see them at work in such a beautifully realized film that justifies its stage-to-screen transition without sacrificing an ounce of intimacy.

Finally, someone brave enough to point out that family reunions are like horror movies.

Memorable directing: distance from the characters, often shot through doorways, as if something is looming. Often a lack of camera movement but sometimes Karam does use it, especially in the last while. But the distance is at odds with it because this chamber film does not feel intimate. That in itself would be okay if the dialogue/characters gave us anything to latch onto. Hard to give a shit most of the time. Brief horror elements feel tacked on at best, unnecessary at worst.

I'm realizing I rarely like movies based on plays that are so dialogue driven. I was so bored watching this. I couldn't even view the apartment poorly. All I could see was the potential such a cool space like that had. The wood flooring was great and there's a spiral staircase. What a score! These people droned on and I kept daydreaming of all the ways to fix up the apartment and decorate it.

Loved the lingering shots of a decaying New York apartment. The symbols of given up dreams and a depressing future. Not entirely sure the big bomb drop is all that earned but I love Richard Jenkins so he reeled me in.

A peculiarly beautiful inversion of the haunted house genre. Encapsulated in a throwaway line during a dinner party conversation, the film asks what if the humans are the monsters, haunting dark corners? While that conceit can easily become eye-rolling, this film manages to steer clear of being cloying just through its barefaced, vulnerable genuineness. While the script may have have been a stage play, the cinematography consistently elevates it as a movie. The final shot was jaw-dropping.

the tension of a family holiday dinner, the claustrophobia of apartment living in nyc, mental health shit, dementia and loads of unsettling machanical sounds contributed to it being more of a horror film than i anticipated. richard jenkins being one of those faces i've kept noticing seeing since watching the dahmer series and he's incredible again here

Another ridiculous movie to choose to watch on an airplane. A better A24 thanksgiving movie than Krisha, which is faint praise indeed but not nothing. Strangely, for a play adapted to the screen by its own writer, it's much stronger on a visual/audio level than its often clunky, ham-fisted script deserves (does it all boil down to 9/11? Of fucking course it does).

humans...☕️☕️