Review Roundup: THE HUMANS Film Starring Jayne Houdyshell, Beanie Feldstein, Amy Schumer, & More

The film adaption of The Humans will stream on Showtime beginning November 24.

The Humans was adapted from the Tony winning play of the same name. It's written/directed by Stephen Karam, who helmed the play as well. The cast includes Beanie Feldstein, Richard Jenkins, Amy Schumer, Steven Yeun, June Squibb and Jayne Houdyshell. It's a tense, intimate and occasionally funny drama with a haunting undertone throughout.

Erik Blake has gathered three generations of his Pennsylvania family to celebrate Thanksgiving at his daughter's apartment in lower Manhattan. As darkness falls outside and eerie things start to go bump in the night, the group's deepest fears are laid bare. The piercingly funny and haunting debut film from writer-director Stephen Karam, adapted from his Tony Award-winning play, The Humans explores the hidden dread of a family and the love that binds them together.

The critics have spoken...

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Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times: "And had I not seen the play, I may not have fully registered how ingeniously Karam has used the freedom of film to open up and underscore his already powerful material. Inside that haunted house, the family members in "The Humans" are all as trapped as Momo is in her illness, shrieking uselessly into the void."

Mick LaSalle, The San Francisco Chronicle: "Stephen Karam's excellent play "The Humans" has been made into a movie, and that should be good news. Unfortunately, the director was completely misguided and botched the film altogether. Not counting no-budget movies with casts of nonprofessionals, "The Humans" is one of the worst-directed films in recent memory. It plays like a wicked practical joke or a deliberate act of sabotage."

Jesse Hessenger, Paste Magazine: "Karam has a terrific ear for the realistic and, as such, calls upon his cast to do a lot of near-invisible acting-to make conversational slights, family in-jokes and half-overheard murmurs sound as true as possible. Simply put, everyone succeeds. Familiar faces cohere into a convincing family."

Jason Adams, The Film Experience: "It arrives just in time for everybody to experience their own adjacent holiday traumas both inside and outside the screening rooms and theaters. Is this already the greatest Thanksgiving movie ever made?"

Keith Watson, Slant Magazine: "The cast-which also includes June Squibb as Momo, Brigid and Aimee's senile, wheelchair-bound grandmother-deliver finely shaded performances that never lapse into the sort of showy emotiveness that so frequently plagues stage-to-screen adaptations."

Trace Sauveur, Austin Chronicle: "Overheard gossip, passive-aggressive insults, and exposed secrets are aplenty and conveyed through biting humor in the early stages and striking emotional gut-punches when the going gets tough. The incredible ensemble really sells the material, you can feel the unspoken history between each individual family member in their smallest interactions with each other."

David Sims, The Atlantic: "Awkward dynamics, strained conversation, and muttered squabbling ensue. Karam, the play's director and a debut filmmaker, shoots it like a haunted-house film, layering in jump scares; freaky, distorted imagery; and an overwhelming sense of dread as tensions rise. The movie captures the frightening atmosphere of the play without feeling at all stagebound."

Kevin Fallon, The Daily Beast: 'It's a towering performance from Jenkins, with Houdyshell delivering, in contrast, a matriarch so lived-in and familiar-so human-that the film couldn't work without her. Schumer also proves to be a casting stroke of genius. Aimee's self-deprecating humor punctuates the script with levity-don't be fooled, The Humans is deceptively hilarious."

Peter Debruge, Variety: "Plays can get away without a lot of plot, since theater is so often about spending time with interesting characters and the pleasure (or discomfort) of being in their company. I'll admit that Karam's camera strays down one too many empty hallways for my taste, but I love the patience with which he lets things unfold, the respect he shows this family, and the way these characters don't feel like characters at all, but real people - fellow humans."

David Ehrlich, IndieWire: "A prestigious screen adaptation of a Tony-winning play is just not the sort of thing that one expects to watch between their fingers, even if it stars legendary scream queens [checks notes] Beanie Feldstein, Amy Schumer, and... June Squibb? Indeed, even those familiar with Karam's widely fêted one-act may be rattled by the extent to which 'The Humans' eventually blurs the line between Chekhov and Polanski - Broadway and Blumhouse."

Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter: "The acting is uniformly superb, with all the performers plumbing subtle depths and displaying a convincing familial chemistry ... But it's Houdyshell, the sole holdover from the original stage cast, who gives the film its beating, vulnerable heart. One of our most invaluable theater actresses, she's too rarely been given the opportunity to truly shine in film, and she seizes this opportunity and runs away with it."

Benjamin Lee, The Guardian: "There's something both reassuring and terrifying about it all, the family's resilient warmth and togetherness providing comfort as the existential horror of what it all amounts to chills us simultaneously. The Humans is going to haunt me and it's going to haunt you too."

Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair: "What The Humans is really about is not any one particular danger, but instead the constant gnawing of the world, the way it slowly erodes our lives until we are all rendered, essentially, into nothing. There is also a chill of a specifically American panic, born of a depressed economy and the lingering wound of September 11th. But there is nothing didactically "Here's How We Live Now" about Karam's writing; he is far more interested in psychological and emotional tenor than he is in delineating anything concrete."

Robert Abele, The Wrap: "The actors' top-notch characterizations are a matrix of fault lines and abiding love, starting with Jenkins' mix of genially judgmental bonhomie and crippling unease, and Houdyshell's sturdily epic mom-ness. Feldstein and Schumer are believable sisters with veneers of wit they hope will keep sensitivities and disappointment at bay. As sweet-natured Rich, Yeun captures the gently nervous energy of fitting in with a new family, while Squibb has to seem there but not there, and does so perfectly."

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Watch the trailer for the new film here:

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