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Thanksgiving doesn’t have the greatest reputation among the major American holidays. It’s a time of the year often most famous for confrontational family conversations and marketers tend to give it the cold shoulder. It’s not that the other big holidays are perfect or that it’s impossible to have a good Thanksgiving. But Thanksgiving doesn’t have any of the present-opening joys of Christmas or fun parties of Halloween to compensate for its shortcomings. It’s harder to distract one from how often this holiday is known for shouting matches and burnt turkeys more than anything else. Maybe that’s why Hollywood has often avoided making movies centered on this holiday, though The Humans, a 2021 drama directed by Stephen Karam, makes it clear there’s lots of compelling cinematic potential to be wrung out of the terrors specific to Thanksgiving.
What is ‘The Humans’?
An adaptation of Karam’s award-winning play of the same name, The Humans chronicles the Blake family as they gather in a cramped New York City apartment rented out by Brigid Blake (Beanie Feldstein) and her partner Richard (Steven Yeun). Attending the event are parents Erik (Richard Jenkins) and Deidre Blake (Jayne Houdyshell) as well as Erik’s sister, Aimee (Amy Schumer), and senile grandma Momo (June Squibb). From the get-go, people are making passive-aggressive comments about one another, with lots of simmering tension boiling under the surface of most interactions between family members. This only gets worse the more the day wears on.
It’s not hard to see why many opted not to see The Humans when it first debuted last year. On a practical level, its release fell off the radar of even the most dedicated film geeks since A24 opted to drop it on Showtime on Thanksgiving 2021 alongside a smattering of theatrical engagements. Even if it had been playing in hundreds of theaters across the country, though, it’s doubtful audiences would be rushing out to see it. This is a dark movie that intends to make viewers uncomfortable and is unflinching in chronicling a family that is being held together by scotch tape. The same material that makes The Humans less marketable to the general public, though, is also what ensures it’s such a perfect Thanksgiving movie.
How ‘The Humans’ Captures Thanksgiving Awkwardness
The Humans perfectly captures the awkward and contentious atmosphere of your average Thanksgiving gathering. Karam’s dialogue is so skillful in penning exchanges between human beings rife with undercurrents of condescension and accusations, punctuated by occasional bursts of overt antagonism (namely Brigid’s recurring comments about her mom’s weight). Seeing relatives for the first time in nearly a year often is a chance for old wounds to get opened up and ancient rivalries to get revived. Karam’s writing accurately paints a vivid picture of how this antagonism manifests in ways both big and small throughout a typical Thanksgiving.
It isn’t just in the dialogue that Karam captures the contentious atmosphere associated with this holiday. The visual style of The Humans also perfectly reflects key aspects of this holiday, an especially impressive feat since many film adaptations of plays often opt for generic camerawork that doesn’t show much in the way of extra thought. However, Karam eschews that convention by imbuing The Humans with a restrained and glacial style of camerawork that frequently opts for capturing the lead characters of the movie in wide shots captured from afar. The audience is often kept at arm’s length from these characters just like the members of the Blake family keep themselves emotionally distant from one another.
Going such a patient route with the camerawork has the added bonus of accentuating the awkwardness we’ve all felt during a Thanksgiving dinner. There’s rarely a quick cut in the editing by Nick Houy to provide an escape for the viewer from the impact of harmful words or phrases exchanged between loved ones. We’re trapped in the room and must absorb the full impact of each barb. It was a bold risk for Karam to eschew flashier camerawork for such a dialogue-heavy movie, but in doing so, he managed to cement that this movie could capture the uneasy ambiance of Thanksgiving perfectly.
Almost all of these visuals are captured in the cramped interior environment that Brigid and Richard now call home. Even with his affinity for wide shots, Karam still makes the claustrophobia of this environment palpably apparent to the viewer. It never feels like there’s quite enough space in any room in this place, while even the hallways outside the apartment are more cramped than cozy. This is a critical part of why The Humans works so well as a Thanksgiving movie since this visual element reinforces the sense that these people are trapped with each other for an entire day.
Many traditional movies covering Thanksgiving typically take place in upper/middle-class domiciles that offer roomy backdrops for familial strife. Even when things get incredibly contentious, there’s usually a massive backyard or an equally large guest room for both characters and the audience to find solace in. Getting the kind of spacious architecture eye candy that dominates the films of Nancy Meyers can be a joy, but it’s not perfect for every story. For The Humans, setting the action within an apartment where you can practically feel the walls closing in on you ensures that the tension between family members feels extra potent and inescapable.
The Emotional Complexities of Thanksgiving in ‘The Humans’
The Humans doesn’t paint the best picture of either families or Thanksgiving. That’s understandable given how stressful both of those elements can be. But there is a reason so many of us still gather with blood relatives for one Thursday every November. While some families are undeniably too toxic to keep around, for many people, families are something you can’t live without just as much as you can’t live with. The Humans recognizes this in a closing sequence depicting Erik trying to fix a power outage in the apartment. Convinced he can fix it himself, he journeys into the dark void, with the entire screen consumed by an endless sea of black. As he tries to navigate this darkened domain, Erik becomes overwhelmed with grief. Thankfully, Brigid eventually comes into her apartment, finds her father, and the duo exit the place together.
For much of its runtime, The Humans has functioned as a perfect Thanksgiving movie because of its unflinching approach to unspeakably awkward social interactions. But this closing sequence reinforces its status as the quintessential Thanksgiving film by reminding viewers that we still need our family. Nobody travels this world alone, doing so only leaves us like Erik in the darkened apartment: grief-stricken and unsure of where to go next. Whether they’re blood-related or a found family, we need the people closest to us to make sense of a world that’s often incomprehensible.
Thanksgiving can be a time for incredibly awkward political digressions from that one uncle or pointed critiques of your physique from your cousin, but it can also be a time to appreciate the people in your life who make the darkness of life more bearable. It’s impossible to imagine those being able to co-exist with the more toxic parts of Thanksgiving, but in many cases, they do. Embracing this complexity, with such nuances handled perfectly by a superb cast, is one of the many reasons The Humans tackles this turkey-centric holiday with so much more success than your average Thanksgiving movie.
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