This stagey debut film from writer-director Stephen Karam, adapted from his Tony Award-winning play, explores the hidden secrets of a family and the love that keeps them intact.
“The Humans” has Erik Blake (Richard Jenkins) gathering three generations of his Pennsylvania family to celebrate Thanksgiving at his daughter's new lower Manhattan apartment. Pent up frustrations start to be stirred up. Erik’s wife (Jayne Houdyshell) continuously yaps about the most inane things, as their daughter Aimee (Amy Schumer) is still reeling over a breakup and her sister Brigid (Beanie Feldstein) brings over her new beau, Richard (Steven Yuen), to meet the family,
As day turns to night, eerie things start to occur in the apartment; doors randomly creak, lights flicker on/off and loud thuds are heard. No, this isn’t a horror movie, it’s just New York City, but Karam tries to film it like one with the group's deepest fears slowly revealing themselves until the crescendo hits.
Karam frames most of his scenes through doorways and hallways, almost all of them filmed in wide-angled shots —there aren't that many close-ups, if any. The camera sometimes focusing on ceiling stains, leaks on the walls, while the characters converse. It’s all absurdly overdirected, distractingly so. Karam’s meticulous obsession with framing becomes too heavy-handed. We are left detached and uninvolved, as we are unintentionally told to pay attention to the stylized direction rather than the actual story and its characters.
I get it, Karam is trying to keep far away from the stage roots of his script by trying to make the whole thing cinematic, but he overplays his hand. For a film so concerned about humans — their fears, dreams, and connections — Karam ends up doing the very thing he should be avoiding: isolating them. [C]
The short version: "Woman Unknown" was a compromise. The jury deadlocked over "Possible Love" and "NAZA," not able to com to terms, fell back on their #3, May el-Toukhy's film.