The Cronenberg cinematic family tree adds another branch this week with the directorial debut of Caitlin Cronenberg\u2019s \u201cHumane,\u201d starring Jay Baruchel, Peter Gallagher, and Emily Hampshire. Anyone coming to this film for more of the body horror imagery in the work of David Cronenberg or Brandon Cronenberg should mostly temper expectations of surreal terror. But there’s definitely thematic connective tissue:\u00a0this is another genre flick about losing control of your own being.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Michael Sparaga\u2019s script starts with a clever premise — imagining a world in which climate change and overpopulation have led to forced euthanasia. But it\u00a0then has almost no idea what to do with it, as Cronenberg’s film dissipates into a series of unbelievable decisions made by people we don’t care about, shot in a surprisingly flat style. The scariest thing about \u201cHumane\u201d is how genuinely believable its nightmare vision ends up being. However,\u00a0the film\u2019s micro approach to a macro crisis never connects because we\u2019re never given a reason to care about these specific people.<\/p>\n
All of \u201cHumane\u201d takes place on a single day at the fancy home of former news anchor Charles York (Peter Gallagher), who brings his family together as the world reels from an international order that the entire population must be diminished by 20%. Who would be forced into euthanasia? Would a “Purge”-like situation of lawlessness emerge? The most famous York son, Jared (Jay Baruchel), is the kind of guy who seems to be profiting off the misery of the world, a Tucker Carlson-esque talking head who believes national euthanasia is for the greater good. <\/p>\n
The family gathering shifts gears when Charles tells the children that he\u2019s decided that he and his latest wife, Dawn (Uni Park), have volunteered to shuffle off this mortal coil, and a smarmy technician named Bob (Enrico Colantoni) shows up to get the job done. While the emotional upheaval of that announcement is still thick in the air, something goes wrong\u2014of course\u2014leading to the kids having to pick another person to fulfill the order. You can imagine how that goes. Resentments, regrets, and general sibling anger fill the bulk of \u201cHumane,\u201d which sometimes plays like an episode of \u201cSuccession\u201d in which the Roys must decide which one of Logan\u2019s kids to execute. <\/p>\n
That actually might make it sound more fun than this film ended up. Most of what\u2019s clever about \u201cHumane\u201d exists on its fringe\u2014including perhaps that a Cronenberg has made a film that\u2019s, at least in part, about nepotism\u2014primarily in how it throws its characters from their ivory tower and then watches them fight in the mud over who gets to climb back up. The social commentary talking points\u00a0embedded in \u201cHumane\u201d are undoubtedly intriguing, but too many of them feel superficial, flirting with ideas about privilege without having much to say about them. Jared is the kind of guy who goes on TV to be a shill for his government, going as far as to suggest that he would sacrifice his own child if asked to do so. What would happen to someone like that when they have to actually act on their words?\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Cronenberg cinematic family tree adds another branch this week with the directorial debut of Caitlin Cronenberg\u2019s \u201cHumane,\u201d starring Jay Baruchel, Peter Gallagher, and Emily Hampshire. Anyone coming to this film for more of the body horror imagery in the work of David Cronenberg or Brandon Cronenberg should mostly temper expectations of surreal terror. But …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[48,51,37],"class_list":["post-1201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-horror-movies","tag-horror","tag-science-fiction","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}