Film Review — Humane. Caitlin Cronerberg’s debut feature has…

When your surname is Cronenberg, expectations are always going to be high. Following her legendary father and brother, Caitlin Cronenberg now steps forward, attempting to continue the family’s long and mostly bloody business.

Being something of a Cronenberg disciple I went into Humane mostly blind, more than willing to give just about anything with a passing connection to the family name a go. I expected something suitably unsettling, but unfortunately Humane is a deeply disappointing mess that, aside from an intriguing premise, fails on a number of levels.

Like I said, the premise is an interesting one. Set at some point in the near future the world has suffered some sort of environmental collapse so severe that the world’s collective governments have agreed to reduce the global population by 20%.

Assuming the population in the film is similar to ours, that’s about 1.6 billion people who’ve gotta go. Yikes.

Citizens can volunteer or “enlist” to be euthanised in exchange for rewards for their families. It’s an idea that feels grimly plausible, something we’ve seen covered in other dystopian films like Children of Men. That’s the last time I’m going to reference Alfonso Cuaron’s modern masterpiece here, that’s for sure.

Rather than focusing on the wider collapse of the planet, this low-budget feature wisely zooms in on a single wealthy family, gathering for dinner as the father reveals he’s decided to enlist. Naturally, things go south from here.

With scenes featuring multiple already wealthy children squabbling over things like inheritance and self-worth, it’s not long before this started to remind me of something else. But where Succession featured razor-sharp writing and biting satire, Humane is comparatively blunt. The writing is amateurish, the dialogue is clunky and laden with unnatural exposition. None of the characters featured here act like real human beings. The first act, where the family reunites, quickly feels like it’s cribbing from HBO’s relentlessly brutal family drama, but here all the bickering and pithy banter lacks the same wit.

Performance-wise the film also struggles. Jay Baruchel feels miscast as the eldest of the York children, a snivelling government mouthpiece whose unconvincing presence often, and you have to assume unintentionally, gives the film a more comedic tone than anything else.

The same can also be said for the film’s “villains”, the privately contracted team of enforcers sent to collect the enlisted. With Bob (Galaxy Quest’s Enrico Colantoni), the film has an opportunity to explore some interesting ideas: the cold bureaucracy of death, perpetrators of systemic injustice, the banality of evil, even. But no, instead we get a collection of strangely goofy characters, a thinly drawn goon squad whose presence is more Keystone Cops than anything we should be taking seriously.

But Humane’s fatal flaw is that it simply tries to juggle way too much at once. It wants to be a dark satire, a dystopian horror, a moral parable, but it’s not sharp, or scary or insightful enough to succeed with any of this. The film shows fleeting signs, ideas that feel like they share strands of Cronenbergian DNA — corporate cruelty, detached human systems functioning without a trace of empathy — but these moments are too few and far between, diluted further with cringe exchanges, and head-scratching tonal shifts.

To her credit, Caitlin Cronenberg does show flashes of skill behind the camera. The film enjoys a few moments of quality, there’s a crispness to the cinematography, and she clearly understands composition and the power of lighting (or in one of the film’s rare high points, the lack of any). There are hints here of a filmmaker with potential, but with such a shoddy and undercooked script a lot of her efforts are sadly rendered inert.

It’s a shame to see such a good concept go to waste. Humane is conceptually rich but sorely lacks execution.