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About This Film
Three generations of the Blake family gather in Brigid and Richard’s new downtown Manhattan apartment for Thanksgiving. The duplex is nearly empty, oddly shaped, poorly lit, and filled with unexplained mechanical noises. Stephen Karam adapts his own play by refusing to make the camera simply reproduce a stage production. Instead, doorways, hallways, ceilings, pipes, and off-screen sounds turn the apartment into an anxious physical system around a family already carrying money trouble, illness, religious guilt, resentment, and fear. Thanksgiving matters because everyone has arrived with the expectation that gathering is itself a form of reassurance. The meal forces proximity, but proximity does not automatically produce understanding. Richard Jenkins’s Erik is increasingly unsettled by the space, while Jayne Houdyshell’s Deirdre keeps trying to sustain ordinary family rhythm. The film finds horror not in a supernatural revelation but in how much can remain unresolved after everyone has eaten together.
Famous Quote
“Don't you think it should cost less to be alive?”— Erik Blake (English)
Vibe
Thanksgiving —
Watch For
- Watch the framing through doorways and from distant rooms; the apartment often seems to observe the family rather than simply contain them.
- Listen closely to pipes, machinery, impacts, and neighboring noise—the sound design turns ordinary building systems into anxiety.
- Notice how Thanksgiving food and family rituals continue even as conversations expose financial, medical, and emotional stress.
- Track Erik’s movement through the apartment as darkness increases; physical descent mirrors a growing loss of control.
Production Notes
A24 identifies The Humans as Stephen Karam’s 2021 feature debut as writer-director, adapted from his Tony Award–winning play. The film stars Richard Jenkins, Jayne Houdyshell, Amy Schumer, Beanie Feldstein, Steven Yeun, and June Squibb. A24’s synopsis makes Thanksgiving the explicit reason three generations gather in Brigid’s lower-Manhattan apartment. Karam’s major adaptation decision was spatial: the camera can retreat into hallways, look through rooms, linger on fixtures, and isolate characters within architecture in ways theater cannot. The production therefore makes the apartment itself part of the adaptation. Rather than opening the story outward with numerous new locations, Karam intensifies the single environment through cinematography and sound, preserving the play’s compression while making it distinctly cinematic.
Trivia
- The film adapts Stephen Karam’s Tony Award–winning play, and Karam directed the screen version himself.
- A24 lists the runtime at 1 hour 48 minutes.
- The gathering is explicitly a Thanksgiving dinner for three generations of the Blake family.
- Jayne Houdyshell reprises the role of Deirdre from the Broadway production.
- The film uses the apartment’s sounds and architecture to create unease without converting the family drama into conventional supernatural horror.
Legacy
The Humans extends a major American Thanksgiving-film tradition in which the holiday table functions less as comfort than as forced emotional proximity. Its contribution is architectural. Where many family dramas emphasize cutting between faces, Karam frequently lets space dominate, placing characters at the edges of frames or behind walls and doorways. That approach gives the movie a hovering dread that critics often compared to horror even though the family’s fears are largely ordinary: aging parents, medical uncertainty, debt, job insecurity, relationship strain, and the possibility of losing control. The result preserves the play’s ensemble intelligence while creating a cinematic identity independent of the stage production. As a holiday film, it is valuable precisely because Thanksgiving remains recognizable—food, prayers, family updates, awkward conversation—while the apartment reveals how fragile the reassurance of gathering can be.