Humane review: The world is awful, and so is this family

One day, should humanity be blessed enough to continue upon its current collective perch, the old op-ed pages of national newspapers will provide their own records of our social temperature in these charged times. Future generations, then, will get to judge—perhaps harshly—the nature of our collective preoccupations.

But another, far more telling inventory will be recorded, in the form of (largely) genre films and TV shows that aim to unpack the warped, dystopian ways in which we harm each other. Case in point: Caitlin Cronenberg’s engaging and entertaining, if also imperfect, feature directorial debut Humane, a darkly humorous horror thriller that invites viewers to have some fun with the arguably dreadful and untenable state of the world. It’s movies like this that say a lot about the times in which they’re created—often much more than grand, sweeping “statements” of so-called serious cinema.

Set over the course of one day, Humane unfolds against the backdrop of a beguilingly open-ended global ecological disaster. The fallout and ensuing resource shortage has forced developed nations to adopt dramatic population reduction goals by way of patriotically framed paid euthanasia programs—voluntary for the time being, but with the rumor of a possible draft.

In a wealthy Ontario enclave, recently retired television news anchor Charles York (Peter Gallagher) has invited his grown children to a fancy dinner cooked by his second wife, Dawn (Uni Park), a successful chef. The reason for the evening: the pair’s plan to announce their intentions to enlist in Canada’s opt-in initiative. This announcement understandably sets off the already at-odds York siblings, consisting of professor and TV talking-head Jared (Jay Baruchel), under-fire business executive Rachel (Emily Hampshire), recovering addict Noah (Sebastian Chacon), and aspiring actress Ashley (Alanna Bale).

When Dawn gets cold feet and flees, the private subcontractor who performs the service, headed up by no-nonsense ex-corrections officer Bob (Enrico Colantoni), presses the Yorks on the need to collect on the contractually owed number of bodies, driving the semi-estranged siblings into various states of paranoia and potentially lethal plotting.

First, what Humane gets right: Michael Sparaga’s screenplay conjures a believable world in economic and fairly effortless fashion, making great use of small details (characters using foil-lined umbrellas, and coating glass windows with protective film) that establish its main concept and lay a convincing narrative track for a society, riven with inequities and an imbalance in the ask of shared burden, in which the commodification and privatization of the business of death has brought all types of resentments bubbling to the surface.

While it’s perhaps a stretch to call Humane first and foremost a deep-plumbing social critique, it absolutely has the state of our world (and the class-based decisions we make about the distribution of cost) on its mind. And in this regard, it presents a solid canvas, with plenty of colorful flourishes. Its bureaucratic satire is pinprick sharp. There are branded vans from the perfectly officiously named “Department of Citizen Strategy,” and cheerfully-toned “Enlisters of the Week” TV commercials that peddle cheap emotional uplift.

The film is also interesting, and smart, about choosing to focus on a family of means, and the different views of that privilege within the family unit. It also slides in small bits of dialogue (for instance, noting prisons being opened up to the program), that indicate considerable thoughtfulness about the broader implications of its idea.

Cronenberg, a successful photographer and visual artist, displays a canny sense of genre playfulness, including evocatively framed and sometimes lingering shots of future weapons (like fire pokers). She also elicits and ably manages a comfortably loose-limbed tone that commingles drama, horror action, and dark humor, in large measure because the film doesn’t try to place undue guardrails on sibling flippancy.

Working with cinematographer Douglas Koch, Cronenberg comes up with a visual vocabulary that for the most part keeps fresh the Romanesque and Gothic style mansion which serves as the movie’s primary on-location setting. If she doesn’t display quite the same full-fledged indulgence of body horror as her filmmaker father, neither does she shy away from a pinch of some good, old-fashioned gore.

Once its script, however, pivots to parlor game pitching and horse-trading—as family members jockey for favorable standing with one another—Humane loses more than a bit of its punching power. While a broader treatment of its concept would have no doubt cost much more (and certain criticisms thus run the risk of sounding like finding fault with the film it isn’t, rather than what it is), Humane also comes to feel very much cornered, and hemmed in by its own creative choices.

It handles a subplot about a sibling’s new romantic partner awkwardly. And while the movie introduces a ticking-clock deadline (which is fine), as matters escalate, scenes outside the York home in which Rachel’s pre-teen daughter assays Bob’s character, while very well-acted, sap momentum. Also, without giving away any particulars, two significant third-act moments fall very flat, coming across as false.

Additionally weighing the film down is the uneven nature of its acting. Gallagher is superb, giving the movie emotional grounding and a strong moral point of view. And Colantoni effectively seeds his character’s dry humor with an air of slight menace—bureaucratic callousness that has curdled into outright cruelty. As a government-aligned apologist lending his academic credibility toward dubious state actors, Baruchel trades in an appealingly frustrated temperament, and gets off many of the movie’s best lines (“I know you’re not supposed to say you don’t see color, but I don’t see color!” he stammers at one point). Hampshire is equally up to the task, bringing a self-centered brio to her role as a high-earning single mother.

A good deal less successful are Chacon and Bale, as the less successful York siblings. Their performances are each marked by a good bit of emotional signposting, and Chacon in particular never locates a mode of expression other than anxious, wet-noodled unsettledness. The nature of this imbalance, crucially, further abets a divide as the film unwinds: proactivity from Jared and Rachel comes across as properly motivated, while Noah and Ashley’s choices feel increasingly untrue.

With the aforementioned caveats, Humane still lands as an entertaining watch, especially for genre enthusiasts and fans of its main players. It certainly makes good on its modest budget. Future historians, meanwhile, can more fully assess the noteworthiness of its narrative choices.

Humane will premiere in select theaters and be available to stream on Shudder beginning April 26.