Loud, jarring noises interrupt the holiday chatter, some of them issuing from an upstairs apartment, some from an especially noisy trash compactor. Which is not to say that they’re above a little complaining - and who can blame them? The furniture hasn’t arrived. Also joining the festivities are Brigid’s older sister, Aimee (Amy Schumer), and their paternal grandmother, Momo (June Squibb).
Ordinarily he and Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell), his wife of many years, might be welcoming everyone to their Scranton, Pa., homestead, but this year they’re being hosted by their younger daughter, Brigid (Beanie Feldstein), at the apartment she’s just moved into with her boyfriend, Richard (Steven Yeun). The character who perhaps feels that wasting away most acutely is Erik Blake (Richard Jenkins), the middle-aged patriarch who has gathered here with his family for Thanksgiving dinner. It’s also a blunt metaphor for what nearly every character here experiences: the steady wasting away of body and spirit. It’s as up-close a vision of architectural entropy as I’ve ever seen in a movie. The camera, its range of movement limited within these cramped confines, magnifies stray details of David Gropman’s production design: the stains on the ceiling, the grime on the windows, the brownish drip of leaky pipes, the bumpy, whorl-like textures of paint and plaster. For every minute of this taut but slow-roiling family drama, we are in a dilapidated prewar apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and I mean really in it. You will study your walls a little more closely after seeing “The Humans,” Stephen Karam’s intensely claustrophobic screen adaptation of his Tony-winning play.
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