The new movie Humane comes from what may be a new dynasty in horror film. Caitlin Cronenberg, who here presents her first feature film, is the sister of horror director Brandon Cronenberg and the daughter of the great master of horror, David Cronenberg, who made Dead Ringers, A History of Violence, Scanners and The Fly, among others.
But unlike many of her father鈥檚 body-centered horror films, Caitlin Cronenberg鈥檚 Humane begins with environmental problems. It opens as a climate crisis movie.
A news broadcast goes to an announcement from the Secretary General of the United Nations: Every nation must meet its goals for population reduction, because the Earth is in trouble and there are too many people. A series of precise, chilling shots makes the calamity clear: people holding up sun-shielding umbrellas as they line up for water from a tank truck; half-wrecked cookie-cutter homes with men in white hazmat uniforms; and then, men carrying a black body bag from one of those homes.
All to the tune of 鈥淲e鈥檙e Here for the Good Time鈥� by the Canadian group Trooper.
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It鈥檚 a lively, raucous beginning, filled with a looming sense of dread鈥攂ut then the picture turns flat. Those population reduction goals will be met by supposedly voluntary euthanasia, and with that information, the life and originality drop right out of the film. It retreats into the overworked territory of movies like The Hunger Games. The rich possibility loaded into that dynamic opening dissolves. The climate crisis, which is ripe for good, smart, insightful horror film treatment, vanishes in favor of a cheap sensationalist idea, and then a semi-comic horror movie about a perfectly dreadful family.
A father (Peter Gallagher) summons his four adult children to dinner one evening. Right off the bat it鈥檚 clear that this is no loving family, but there they all are. Dad and his wife have decided to volunteer for that unlikely climate-saving euthanasia, which comes as a surprise to the kids, who think their father is a hypocrite.
Then Bob (Enrico Colatoni) shows up. He鈥檚 a peppy matter-of-fact guy in a white van, from the ambiguously-named Department of Citizen Strategy. His job is to do the euthanasia and take away the two corpses. He 'takes care of' the dad. The wife, on the other hand, has run off, leaving a note saying she鈥檚 not ready to do her dying bit for the good of humanity.
That鈥檚 a problem for Bob. The paperwork says to collect two bodies, and two bodies Bob will have. He tells the children to draw straws鈥攁nd here, the once-promising Humane turns into a sibling stab-fest. Lots of blood, and lots of characters who look dead but manage to rise up to stab once more.
The climate crisis is nowhere to be seen.
It鈥檚 hard to build films about specific present-day problems. They tend to get preachy and literal-minded. For generations, Japanese filmmakers have turned to the past to make movies about the present. The recent cascade of movies about World War II may well be motivated by the host of tensions we face today, including around climate change 鈥� but the past is manageable, and is available for resonant metaphors. It鈥檚 comforting to know that we, the good guys, won World War II, so maybe we can struggle our way out of frightening current dangers just as our ancestors did.
But Humane sinks into the clich茅s of horror movies. It attempts to embody something related to the horror of climate problems, but gets lost in them. Somewhere inside Humane lies the germ of an idea that may work, but the movie flounders in its own blood.
