This Thanksgiving, gorge yourself on the feel-bad family drama of The Humans

The Humans Photo: A24

What a savvy and cruel choice it was to release The Humans this week, on the cusp of the very holiday it depicts. One need not even live in Manhattan, where the film is opening and where its characters break bread, to watch it in the wake of the big meal. It’s on Showtime, too, available at a post-gorging click. Is there a certain kind of family—with tastes that run tony (and Tony-winning)—that might break up their Thursday with a drama of pedigree and prestige? That’s how we use movies on Thanksgiving: as a respite from the very quality time we’re meant to be cherishing. Even those whose hearts have grown fonder in absence after a gap year of forced estrangement may crave a brief escape from annual family baggage. The Humans will not provide it.

The film takes place entirely within a moldering duplex in Lower Manhattan: too big to be called cozy, too small to be called roomy, with tight hallways that put the characters on top of each other at all times and a treacherously spindly staircase connecting each floor. “Rustic” would be a kind euphemism for a place whose pipes leak, creating unsightly tumors of water damage on the peeling wallpaper. The place sits a couple blocks from Ground Zero, we’re told; perhaps national trauma is one of the apparitions blowing down its cramped corridors and going bump in the impending night.

This dump, to put it more bluntly, is the new home of twentysomething musician Brigid (Beanie Feldstein) and her boyfriend, Richard (Steven Yuen). The two have arrived ahead of a truck full of furniture and belongings stuck across town in Queens. In the creaky, empty apartment, the two will host the holiday for Brigid’s family: her bickering Pennsylvania parents, Erik (Richard Jenkins) and Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell); her older attorney sister, Aimee (Amy Schumer); and grandma “Momo” (June Squibb), who’s entered the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s and barely seems present at all.

Over the course of the day, tensions will clang louder than the ancient pipes snaking around the unit. Erik and Deirdre have a secret they’re sitting on, waiting for the right time to break some tough news to their kids. Aimee, meanwhile, has had a very rough year: She’s lost her girlfriend, her job at a Philly law firm, and her good health, compromised by a rare intestinal ailment—a sickness that the building seems to darkly remind her of with every gurgle and drip. “No religion at the table,” the uptight Brigid suggests, but that’s just one topic the characters needle each other about as daylight fades. Others include money, eating habits, mental health, and the strange dreams they recount over one too many drinks at dinner. An unseen, much-discussed lake house takes on so much subtextual freight, it might as well be the Moscow pined for by Chekhov’s three sisters.

In its bald metaphors, outsized themes of class/generational divide, and venom spraying across a single setting, The Humans betrays its origins as big, capital-T Theater. Stephen Karam, its writer and director, adapted the film from his own Tony-winning one-act, which ran on Broadway through the first few months of 2016. (It opened first in Chicago, where the Tribune called it “kind” and “warm”—two words you’d be very hard-pressed to deploy in describing this nightmarishly caustic screen version.) Karam does not attempt to “open up” the material with, say, a quick trip to the local bodega for a gallon of milk. Besides one late wander to the roof, The Humans never sets foot outside the dungeon-like digs Brigid and Richard now call home. To do so would violate the crucial claustrophobia of the piece, its suffocating intimacy.

Which is not to say that the film is stagey, exactly. Karam has rethought the material for the screen, rescuing The Humans from the threat of mere filmed theater. Some of its most cinematic qualities come straight from the stage production; that includes its soundtrack, an unnerving cacophony of offscreen interruptions: mysterious thuds from the unit above, groaning radiators, roaring trash compactors. But Karam also builds on that nerve-pricking approach by filming The Humans like a horror movie. Sometimes, the camera rolls from an ominous distance, squeezing the characters into narrow spaces and peeking at them through cracks in doors. Other times, it settles on napes, slowly spins around the dinner table, or creeps in slowly.

In fact, it’s tempting to describe The Humans as a haunted house film, with the ghosts replaced by neuroses, economic anxiety, and maybe the specter of September 11th. The Blakes keep jump-scaring each other, popping into tight frames like emotional phantoms. Midway through, as day bleeds into disquieting night, you half expect some monstrosity—maybe the faceless fiend Erik describes from a nightmare that’s shaken him to his core—to lurch out of the shadows and interrupt all the bad-funk gab. The film’s tour de force is a spectacularly orchestrated climax that seems to transform The Humans, for one genuinely scary passage, into the West End sensation The Woman In Black, as the Blake family patriarch is beset by his imagination and anxieties in a darkened living room. If there’s really such a thing as “A24 horror,” this may be the first straight drama made in that style.

All the ooky-spooky flourishes do sometimes feel like overkill, Karam’s chilly compositions occasionally threatening to upstage his actors or obscure their tremendous performances. After all, the cast is the real draw here, each member making a Thanksgiving feast out of the film’s buffet of prickly interactions: Schumer downshifting her dry comic instincts into a scarcely contained despair, Jenkins curdling his natural paternal qualities with dollops of bitterness, Yeun absolutely nailing the polite remove of a significant other whose unyielding civility is a stealth form of noninvolvement. Most impressive may be Booksmart’s Feldstein, who wraps Brigid’s casually judgmental jabs in cheeriness, or maybe Houdyshell, the lone original cast member from the show, reprising her role to perfectly approximate free-speaking but easily wounded Middle American motherhood. Even Squibb has her spotlight moments, wailing with wavering awareness from the near-catatonic void.

In this ensemble showcase, there’s a familiar but still potent vision of family as comfort and burden at once. What’s scarier, it finally asks: the thought that we’re stuck with these people until the end, or the possibility that we could actually lose them—that their love is more conditional than we thought? The Humans holds a smudged mirror up to any unsuspecting viewers who might enter its cramped Chinatown abode in search of distraction from the unresolved resentments of their own clan. It looms large in the small canon of Thanksgiving cinema, a quintessential stomachache of a movie.