'The Humans:' Steven Yeun, Beanie Feldstein, & Richard Jenkins, Only Partially Save A24's Dark Horror Comedy

In writer-director Stephen Karam’s feature debut, the dark horror-comedy “The Humans,” it’s not so much a bump in the night or the creak in the door that can rupture an untapped fear. Those are merely the externalized notes that grant music to the ever-present existential dread. These are primordial forces that afflict us in our dreams and in our prayers, ones we sometimes paper over with religion or companionship. Brigid (Beanie Feldstein), an aspiring composer, and Richard (Steven Yeun), who’s studying to be a social worker after dating for nearly a year, are choosing companionship. They’re moving in with each other.

Adapted from Karam’s same-titled Tony Award-winning play, “The Humans” opens with Brigid and Richard celebrating moving into their ramshackle basement duplex apartment in New York’s Chinatown by inviting Brigid’s family over for Thanksgiving dinner. From preparation to dessert, from squabbles to confessions, from poking and prodding, their evening together happens in real-time. Karam’s “The Humans” meanders—sleepwalks even—through its desired seismic beats and is only partly saved by some exceptional sound work and well-layered performances.

The family is supposed to be lower-middle class, but nothing in this film, economically, makes much sense. Both Brigid and Richard are supposed to be struggling, but they can afford a duplex in New York City. Their father teaches at a private Catholic school; his employment there allowed him to grab free tuition for both of his daughters. It also allowed him to own a lake house. You really have to suspend your disbelief to accept or even empathize with people who own a lake house. So when Brigid complains about her parents not helping her financially, it’s difficult not to scoff as she laments in her duplex.

The action of the single-act play takes place, for the most part, within the confines of a virtually unfurnished apartment. The main players include Erik (Richard Jenkins) and Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell) — an irritable Irish Catholic mother and father from Scranton, Pennsylvania — their sarcastic lesbian daughter Aimee (Amy Schumer), and Momo (June Squibb), a wheelchair-using grandmother suffering from dementia. The set itself includes a spiral staircase, allowing for editor Nick Houy‘s overlapping editing between the two floors and rooms that seem to stagger off in unknowable directions.

“The Humans,” as expected, is dialogue-heavy, and often the most heart-wrenching details can lurk in an expansive sequence of words. For instance, when the family is sharing their bad dreams, Erik speaks about a nightmare wherein he sees a woman with a melted face. His family laughs at his vulnerability. They’re unaware of how much his worry is grounded in reality. Another tear-jerking scene occurs when Deirdre reads aloud a life-affirming email Momo wrote when she still retained some lucidity. And Momo herself, vocalized by the wailing screams of Squibbs, who’s never not at the top of her game, offers an added layer of pathos for this family, sure. But she imbues the story with further existential dread by externalizing the pain of losing yourself: What is it like to no longer exist but still be alive?

To be totally fair, her pad isn’t all that glamorous. Paint is bubbling from the walls. One by one, the lightbulbs are short-circuiting. And a mysterious neighbor stomps on the floor. That’s one of the real hallmarks of “The Humans;” the tight sound design contributes to a bevy of sharp jump scares. Gasping crashes of dishes in the kitchen, the battering clang of a trash compactor, or the clank of a laundry room makes for a concert of frights. These auditory spine tinglers are given additional weight when Erik spots from a window a random person in his daughter’s closed-off courtyard.

This trio of veteran actors taps into the varied depths of their characters, unpacking the kind of emotional craters that the years might fill in but never totally pat down. Jenkins, especially, whose character recalls 9/11 and how he dropped off his corporate lawyer daughter Aimee for her first interview, only to narrowly avoid the terrorist attack because the observation deck wasn’t open early enough, can’t shake how narrowly he and Aimee survived. Jenkins elucidates the baggage — the safety in religion, his daughters leaving the church and the shame swirling within him — that would be lost by many lesser actors.

His younger castmates, unfortunately, aren’t so lucky. Schumer is funny, but her performance doesn’t vocalize the deep heartbreak her character is feeling at the end of a long-term relationship. Rather she has one cathartic scene, but the remnants of that moment don’t seep into any of her other scenes. Likewise, Yuen is hilarious, but he and Feldstein have zero chemistry. And his character isn’t given enough room to express his struggles with depression. Instead, the mention comes and goes without much breath. And Feldstein is supposed to be playing a composer, but barring one listen to a string-heavy composition, that artistic spirit doesn’t reside in Feldstein’s portrayal. That’s the problem with “The Humans:” Haram thinks by merely saying what a thing is, that makes it so for the audience.

The first half of “The Humans” operates at a stiff pace. It only picks up in the second half because the more experienced stage actors — Jenkins and Houdyshell, who keep their deeper character motivations well-hidden yet well-expressed — carry the load with the stage material. In Haram’s film, there are also some first-time director jitters: over-cutting, compositions meant to offer a feeling of bravura but only create distance, and montages of extreme close-ups that do not speak with the emotive verve he’s aiming toward. Karam’s “The Humans” might have worked better on stage. However, as a film, “The Humans” provides serrated frights and big challenges for its actors, but ultimately, it is too cold and never believable enough to immerse one in its purported dread. [C]

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