The Humans
“The Humans normalizes disability and never flattens it into someone’s sole identity.”
Title: The Humans (2021)
Director: Stephen Karam 👨🏼🇺🇸🌈
Writer: Stephen Karam 👨🏼🇺🇸🌈
Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸
—SPOILERS AHEAD—
Technical: 5/5
Five years after winning the Tony Award for Best Play in 2016, The Humans premiered at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Adapted by playwright-turned-director Stephen Karam, early positive reviews and a seal of approval by indie powerhouse A24—which produced the movie alongside IAC Films—makes this one to watch come its U.S. release date of November 24.
The acclaim is warranted. The Humans deftly avoids stage-to-screen pitfalls such as overly long monologues or staid set design. In fact, its setting of a claustrophobic, roach-infested New York City apartment serves as a character in its own right: Ominous closeups of wall stains convey ongoing anxiety, while alarming thumps from upstairs neighbors jolt the film with intermittent scares.
As for human characters, talents like Steven Yeun, Richard Jenkins, Beanie Feldstein, and Amy Schumer come together brilliantly, each actor knocking it out of the park in their own respective ways. The Humans’ blend of tightly repressed drama, comedy that works as a pressure release valve, and Karam’s excavations of how we carry trauma provide a deeply affecting experience that will resonate with each of its viewers in different, personalized ways.
Gender: 4.5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES
A gender-balanced cast infuses each character with humanity, although if one had to pick a “main character,” it would probably be Jenkins as blue-collar patriarch Erik Blake. The film shadows his psyche the closest, pausing to observe as he peers at debris floating outside a grungy window or nervously traces his fingers over bubbled, peeling paint.
His wife Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell) and their daughters Brigid (Feldstein) and Aimee (Schumer) never receive the same level of curiosity from the camera, but they still enjoy complexity. Each has her own preoccupations, whether it’s Brigid striving to make her musical career a success or Aimee struggling with a hard breakup while dealing with chronic illness and being let go at work. These women hold extremely complicated relationships with each other, too. The knee-jerk defensiveness between Brigid and her mother will feel painfully familiar to anyone who’s ever butted heads with a family member.
Through it all, the fierce love between the women in the family is palpable. In a quiet moment, the Blake sisters lean on each other in a tired heap, one petting the other’s hair in gentle, calming strokes.
Race: 3.5/5
Director-writer Karam has Lebanese and Irish ancestry, but it’s the latter that comes to the fore in The Humans, a film that centers the Irish-Catholic family of the Blakes.
In the only role of color, Yeun plays Brigid’s supportive boyfriend Rich who helps host Thanksgiving dinner. But this is no starring turn as the family patriarch seen in his last A24 film, Minari (2020). While Yeun’s given the chance to show off subtle comedic chops—his low-key punchlines brought the theater to swells of good humored chuckles during its screening at TIFF—his character development feels extremely light.
Beyond Rich, the only racial diversity comes through Brigid’s mention of their upstairs neighbor as “a 70-year-old Chinese lady” who is never seen, merely heard through sound effects of omnipresent, god-like stomping noises.
Bonus for Disability: +1.00
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) underpins the entirety of Erik’s character. The film patiently sifts through his memories, which snap to the surface in precisely the fragmented way that trauma lives and waits in individuals. Erik’s mother Momo (June Squibb) has dementia and mobility issues. It’s refreshing to see topics of inaccessibility “shown” not “told”: Family members clumsily attempt a 5-point turn with Momo’s wheelchair, butting up against the claustrophobic walls of Brigid and Rich’s tiny New York City apartment simply so she can use the bathroom. Such scenes highlight issues of access more emphatically than mere words could muster alone.
Meanwhile, Schumer’s character Aimee also contends with ulcerative colitis. We see her scheduling surgeries and dealing with how it affects her standing at work, with those stressors exacerbating Aimee’s other struggles such as a difficult breakup. All in all, it’s wonderful to see how The Humans normalizes disability and never flattens it into someone’s sole identity.
Bonus for LGBTQ: +1.00
Karam is openly gay and told queer magazine Next that The Humans is “very personal without being autobiography,” adding that Aimee is “around my age, I used to work in a law firm, and, like most humans, I have suffered heartbreak.” He goes on to add, cheekily, “But I’m a gay man, not a lesbian, which may shock you.”
The heartbreak of which he speaks involves one of Aimee’s primary storylines, revealed slowly over the course of the film that she’d had a serious girlfriend named Carol. The family emotionally supports her as best they can, and it goes against stereotype to see devout working-class parents not make a fuss about having a daughter who is a lesbian.
Bonus for Religion: +0.75
Karam’s Maronite (Catholic) upbringing finds its way to the screen in the Irish-Catholicism of the Blakes. Different levels of piety are sensitively rendered in small but telling ways: Deirdre brings her daughter a statuette of the Virgin Mary as a housewarming gift, prefacing it with “I know you guys don’t believe…” to which Brigid jokes, “Mom, I will absolutely keep this in a drawer somewhere, thank you.” And in one of the film’s most powerful moments, a mostly silent Momo suddenly comes to life at the dinner table and chimes in during prayer, smiling and making eye contact with her delighted family members.
Mediaversity Grade: A+ 5.25/5
The Humans exults in exactly what the title says: humanity. Vulnerability and hurt and love and understated comedy swirl together into the messy knot that makes up people and their relationships. To observe and apply our own experiences to the happenings on screen feels like a privilege that deserves the wider audience The Humans will receive once it’s leapt from the stage and into theaters later this year.
Like The Humans? Try these other family dramas that take place around dinner and meal prep.
Happiest Season (2020)
Malcolm & Marie (2020)
The Farewell (2019)