Humane
Directed by Caitlin Cronenberg
Written by Michael Sparaga
Starring Jay Baruchel, Emily Hampshire, Peter Gallagher, and Enrico Colantoni
Rated R
Runtime: 1 hour, 33 minutes
In select theaters and streaming on Shudder April 26

by Tina Kakadelis, Staff Writer

With a name like Cronenberg comes an expectation of a twisted tale. David Cronenberg is the father of the body horror genre, and his son Brandon has followed in his father’s footsteps with Infinity Pool and Antiviral. Now it’s time for another Cronenberg to take her spot in the director’s chair. Humane marks the feature directorial debut of Caitlin Cronenberg who, like the rest of her family, weaves a tangled, chilling, family-drama thriller.

At some time in the near future, the climate crisis has reached catastrophic proportions. World leaders have come together to create an incentivized initiative for people to be euthanized in order to reduce the population. As one would imagine, the people who “enlist” are disproportionately those living in poverty. They believe the money their next of kin receives will give them a second chance at life. The elite feel as though they’re above making a decision of this kind. Humane centers on a rich family with a distinguished, recently-retired newsman patriarch (Peter Gallagher) who calls his adult children (Jay Baruchel, Emily Hampshire, Sebastian Chacon, and Alanna Bale) together for a dinner to announce his decision to enlist.

Humane is significantly less bloody than other Cronenberg flicks, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less unsettling. The horror of Humane comes from the fact that the events don't feel outside the realm of possibility. If you spend any amount of time reading about climate change, there’s an ever-present worry about what the future of our planet is going to look like. Humane takes those anxieties and creates a claustrophobic chamber piece of our deepest fears. There are no fantastic or otherworldly elements at play in Humane. The film is simply the consequences of our own actions and the desperate lengths people will go to in order to maintain whatever sense of status they can find.

Beneath its survivalist themes, Humane is a dystopian family drama. The debate about enlistment is the catalyst for decades worth of resentment among the siblings. There are fights about inheritance, childhood, and careers. It’s sibling bickering on a completely different scale, a matter of life and death. Baruchel, Hampshire, Chacon, and Bale make an excellent foursome, and each character adds a different side to the debate. Jared (Baruchel) is an anthropologist-turned-TV-spokesperson for the enlistment procedure. Rachel (Hampshire) is the CEO of a pharmaceutical company that’s in hot water. Rachel and Jared look down on their other siblings, Ashley (Bale) and Noah (Chacon). Ashley is trying to be an actor, without much luck, and Noah is a recovering addict and piano prodigy. As the night devolves into chaos, the siblings are pitted against each other and fight about whose life has more value. 

Humane starts off with an angry blast of anti-establishment fury, but its ending is more of a whimper. There are so many potential conversations to be had about how climate change is imminent, how these changes will disproportionately affect those without money, and how corporations and the government are the primary culprits in harming the planet. Even the fictitious government organization that exists to carry out the euthanasia is a for-profit corporation. The film sets up so many avenues to explore. It touches on some of them in the first twenty minutes but descends into more of a run-of-the-mill slasher movie, losing the depth it promised. Even though some of the punch is lost, Humane manages to be a tense survival slasher flick. There’s even some dark humor in the form of Enrico Colantoni, whose job it is to enact the enlistment procedure.

The world created by writer Michael Sparaga is far too interesting to be constrained to 93 minutes. Humane, and the questions it poses, would make for an extremely compelling dystopian miniseries. Because of the limits of its runtime, Humane only scratches the surface of what it wants to explore, but that doesn’t mean the twisted journey isn’t worth experiencing. Let’s just hope it’s not our future.