Alex Heeney reviews Caitlin Cronenberg’s directorial debut, Humane, a huis clos horror film set in a near future of highly encouraged assisted death finds a rich family of awful pepole trying to decide who among them to kill.
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The rise in Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) around the world as a solution to whatever governments don’t want to pay for — disability, aging populations, population growth — is ripe for a horror movie treatment. Caitlin Cronenberg’s debut feature, Humane, is the first film I’m aware of to attempt this, but to mixed results. (Yes, she’s one of those Cronenbergs, sister to Brandon.) By presenting us with heroes we can’t care about and a de facto villain who is the only character with a pulse in the film, Cronenberg keeps a film about a politically charged topic apolitical and hard to invest in.
A huis clos dinner party gone wrong, Humane is set in a not-so-distant future of food insecurity, harmful sunlight, and climate change disaster. Here, “the government” is encouraging people to “enlist” in assisted death. In exchange for curbing population growth and reducing government spending, “enlisted” people’s families receive a quarter of a million dollars.
The Last Supper in Caitlin Cronenberg’s film Humane, reviewed by Alex Heeney
When the film opens, Charles York (Peter Gallagher, in fine form), the Peter Mansbridge of Cronenberg’s vague fictional setting — the film is shot in Toronto, but no country or city is ever mentioned — is gathering his loved ones for a last supper. He’s decided to enlist with his second wife (Uni Park), but none of his four petty adult children, including government advisor Jared (Jay Baruchel, who seems to be in a different movie from everyone else) and despicable CEO Rachel (Emily Hampshire), know this until the dinner happens. Just as the children start to squabble about Charles’s shocking revelation, their dinner is interrupted by the bright-eyed government-contracted euthanasia doctor, Bob (a hilarious Enrico Colantoni), who has come to collect his pounds of flesh.
The children encourage Charles to delay or withdraw from his enlistment. As Jared loves to say — someone who regularly appears on TV to promote enlistment — enlistment isn’t for “people like us.” He means rich people like them. The kind who gather in a gigantic Forest Hill family home to consume gourmet contraband food and count the millions they stand to inherit from the father they don’t care much about. But when Bob takes Charles aside to sign some paperwork, Charles discovers that life might not be worth living as someone going AWOL — especially for a man for whom reputation and money are everything. One little catch: his wife has fled, and once Charles passes, Bob informs the family that he won’t leave until he has another York Family corpse in tow. It’s up to them to decide who to send as tribute.
An intriguing premise falls short in Caitlin Cronenberg’s Humane, which we review
It’s an intriguing premise that should provide an opportunity to deconstruct class privilege, family relationships, and how easily we feed people to the wolves when it seems like us vs. them, even if it’s our own family. Working from a script by Michael Sparaga, Cronenberg’s world-building is quite strong as we discover the government machine behind “enlistment.”
The family becomes quite literally trapped in their house. With internet and phone signals cut off, they can’t access their network of wealth and power to get themselves out of this. When they get to the business of trying to kill each other, a regular occurrence, Bob informs us, they don’t have the necessary medical care when they finally figure out they might be stronger together. Cronenberg and Sparaga achieve all this through a few newscasts at the beginning, brief scenes of the children entering the house, and then dialogue that never feels expositional. She treats everything as unremarkable, letting us spot the strangeness in drips and drabs. We are learning about the hidden intricacies of the program, just as the family is.
A miscalculation in casting and tone in Caitlin Cronenberg’s Humane
Unfortunately, Cronenberg makes some crucial miscalculations in casting and tone, which render this promising idea hard to care about. To begin with, the entire York family are rich assholes. It’s a nice upending of the tropes of the “government is cruel” film, which so often asks us to hate casually cruel government policies because they affect good people, like the Deserving Poor in I, Daniel Blake. Japanese filmmaker Chie Hayakawa’s brilliant euthanasia film, Plan 75, still falls into the trap of making us angry about the euthanasia program because the person affected by it is a good, lonely person who deserves support.
Nothing is deserving about the York Family. Cronenberg and Sparaga spend too little time fleshing out the characters before the horror premise kicks in for them even to be three-dimensionally evil. Unfortunately, that means it’s very, very hard to give a fuck who this group of cartoon villains decide deserves most to die. Plus, we already know from the start that their adopted brother Noah (Sebastian Chacon), a person of colour and a recovering drug addict, will be the first and easy target.
Acting styles clash in Caitlin Cronenberg’s Humane, which we review
None of this is helped by the fact that the actors in the York Family behave like they’re in different movies. Jay Baruchel, a Canadian actor who has somehow failed upwards into high-profile Canadian projects after never quite breaking out stateside, is constantly over-acting. He finds endless tics to embellish his character to take over the scene. More often than not, he’s pulling faces that don’t fit with the rest of the cast’s more naturalistic approach.
Unfortunately, Baruchel’s character is the most developed on paper, leaving the other siblings with little to play, so we focus on Baruchel’s from-another-planet performance. Worse, as an ensemble film, almost every scene features multiple actors, one of the absolute hardest things for a director to pull off well, and the scenes fall flat. Yet we never get a sense of the family’s alliances and squabbles, which might complicate this decision. It’s just the bio children vs the adopted one, the richer children versus the poorer ones.
Although I regularly found myself bored with and ambivalent about the York Family, the film comes to life when Enrico Colantoni’s Bob comes on screen. It helps that the character and the actor are the only ones having fun here. But considering the horrifying program that he’s an agent of, Cronenberg risks having us side with the person doing something awful to awful people rather than critiquing the system that encourages people like Bob to take pleasure in watching a family disintegrate — or drawing straws to do it for them.
Humane lacks sharp social commentary for a film whose premise is a politically charged issue
Then, again, I’m not sure Cronenberg’s film has any ambition to provide social commentary about euthanasia programs. The film’s vague setting means there’s no meaningful connection to the very real and problematic euthanasia happening in Canada right now under the MAiD program. The main reference point in the film is a widespread carceral system as in the US, which euthanasia and ‘enlistment’ have since replaced. Bob bemoans that attending to prisoners’ medical needs was more profitable to him personally than merely collecting bodies, which you can only do once per person.
I don’t think it’s coincidental, either, that the program uses militaristic terminology associated with serving your country for enrolling in the suicide program. The US has much more military culture than Canada. Highlighting American connections and keeping the setting vague suggest that it’s angling for American audiences despite being a Canadian-authored and produced film. The primary nod to the Canadian context is the fact that Bob’s mobile euthanasia service vehicle is filled with boxes labelled “MAiD kits,” which looks like COVID Rapid Test boxes. That’s unfortunate because it removes any teeth the film might have.
Alex Heeney reviews Caitlin Cronenberg’s film Humane, whose ending is a bit too neat
Although the film acknowledges that euthanasia programs like the one in the film mostly affect poorer people, the film is about the 1%. Initially, this seems like an opportunity to consider the “this could happen to you, no matter how privileged you are, and there’s no way out” consequences of killing your population as a panacea for all of the state’s problems. But not finding a way out amidst that much wealth and privilege is unrealistic. It would also be structurally unsatisfying for a film that positions Bob and the government as the villains and a hack as the solution.
That’s not to say there’s no body count or that the Yorks don’t suffer, just that neither they nor we care much about who the casualties are. It makes the result predictable and allows Cronenberg to avoid any real political stand. Considering her film is about a crucial issue that is only ramping up in the worrisome ways it’s being applied but still not yet widely discussed in fiction, it’s a missed opportunity and a disappointment.
Related reading/listening to our review of Caitlin Cronenberg’s film Humane
More on Medical Assistance in Dying: Read our review of Chie Hayakwa’s Plan 75. Read our interview with Chie Hayakawa on making a film about euthanasia.
More Horror/Genre Films by Women: Read our review of Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding and our interview with Glass on Saint Maud. Read our review of South African horror film Good Madam.
More Horror: Get our ebook on feminist horror films, Beyond Empowertainment. The book looks at a spate of horror from the 2010s, featuring interviews with filmmakers and essays on the films.
