The Humans

Beanie Feldstein, Steven Yeun, Richard Jenkins and Amy Schumer star in this unsettling ensemble drama about a family lunch that gets an existentialist horror spin.

Young couple Brigid (Feldstein, Booksmart) and Erik (Yeun, Burning, MIFF 2018) are underemployed and financially overstretched in their decaying Manhattan rental, signing the lease just in time to host Brigid’s out-of-town family: parents Erik (Jenkins, The Shape of Water) and Deirdre, sister Aimee (Schumer, Trainwreck), and dementia-afflicted grandmother Momo. Gathered around the Thanksgiving table, fears and tensions resurface within a creaking, leaking, barely furnished apartment that seems alive with menace.

Adapting his own acclaimed, Tony Award–winning play, debutant director Stephen Karam makes a compelling leap from stage to screen, investing this chamber piece with all the expressionist flourishes and twinge-inducing spookiness of a haunted-house classic. With an exceptional cast – Feldstein, Yeun, Jenkins and Schumer are joined by Broadway stars Jayne Houdyshell and June Squibb – sublimely eerie camerawork from Lol Crawley, and rumbling sound design from Skip Lievsay, The Humans is a whip-smart film about disconnect and disaffection, exposing the dread lurking beneath the everyday.

“Existential dread has rarely felt so intimate and visceral as in Stephen Karam’s directorial debut … A remarkably insightful and powerful portrait of the human condition.” – Hollywood Reporter