Humane

Humane could have been another Purge, and seems somewhat inspired, if only a bit, by that franchise. That it is not, is a good thing. The film works toward different aims, and achieves them in ways that try to be unique, yet often fall just short. A superb cast helps a script that wobbles more than it ought to, and a director who has made a solid debut but still has much to learn. Sebastian Chacon and Enrico Colantoni shine in their roles as Noah, a recovering addict, and Bob, a professional euthanizer. You see, the world has undergone a crisis and all the governments have agreed to “cull” twenty percent of their populations, by various means. In the country this story takes place-perhaps the United States, perhaps Canada-the government has instituted the option to volunteer for being euthanized, which exempts other members of your family, and which also pays you a tax-free sum.

What transpires in the film, about a family facing a crisis against this backdrop, is best experienced for yourself. The film is contained mainly to one location, a house and the driveway/vehicles parked there. The people therein are mostly terrible human beings. That does not mean they are awful characters. Yet, the film does not do a good enough job, early on, giving us any reason to care what happens to any of these people, though they are not boring. We just have no emotional investment. By the end, that may have changed, depending on how forgiving you are and how much you buy the film’s twists and turns.

Courtesy IFC Films

The characters are fairly stock, and disposable, yet somehow you will want to find out how it all ends. In one early sequence, an aspiring actress bemoans the fact that “all I can get is a role in a commercial for a damn videogame I was in. Ugh.” This reviewer could not help but think, yeah, and it probably paid extremely well and if anyone who was in a game said that they were not paying attention. Games are big business and can make or launch careers, or, indeed, become careers, for some performers. That instantly made the character both somewhat unbelievable and unlikable. That is the trouble, with the film. The cast of characters, other than Noah and perhaps one other, are very easy to despise.

The effect is to make you keep waiting for someone to do something horrible to them, both because you hate them and because you do not want to keep looking at their face. If this is the intended effect, bravo, but I fear it was only slightly intentional. The film misses a trick, here, by not giving enough depth to characters clearly meant to be an allegory in a COVID denial, times a thousand, type of situation. While the script makes a lot of big picture connections between the events in the real world and what unfolds on screen, it never goes far enough except in places.

Courtesy IFC Films

There is, of course, some well done dark humor. This both does and does not work, though mainly it works, both because it is so well executed and timed, and because the film would be relentlessly grim and even a bit self-righteous without it. The film could have taken some lessons from director Caitlin Cronenberg’s father, though her aesthetic and his are not totally dissimilar. Here, the focus is not on the body as metaphor for disease but as a location for something else. What that is, I will not spoil. The script tries making points about class and ecology, about family and loyalty, but never goes far enough. It is a satire but without enough bite, and it is almost as though it is scared to go through with what ought to be the convictions of the characters and setting. Because of that, you can never fully buy into what is happening, removing you from total immersion and breaking the spell the film might otherwise cast.

HUMANE is now playing in theaters and available on VOD