Recensioni de* critic*

The Humans struggles to escape its theatrical origins... It’s not the most visually arresting work, but the sound design team excel... The casting is also first-rate, with Richard Jenkins and a wounded, garrulous Jayne Houdyshell the standouts.

Karam has written nothing less than a horror story of and for our time. Set in a lower Manhattan apartment that seems in need of an exorcism, the play brings together six members of a family whose fissures run as deep as their complicated but clearly genuine love.

Karam is determined to do something cinematic with a piece he originally wrote as a play. The camera prowls through the film’s setting — a drab New York apartment — in a style worthy of a horror movie.

The ensemble remains electrifying against the damp. Jenkins puts in his best work since The Visitor, Schumer has never been better, and Houdyshell, whose character weathers endless digs about her weight and eating habits, is remarkable.

The great movies about family gatherings from hell, such as Festen or The Ice Storm, have been joined by this eerie and disturbing debut from Stephen Karam...

Its setup might feel overly familiar or its meticulous dedication to the offbeat a little laborious for some, but nevertheless, The Humans is a well executed, eerie and enthralling exercise in the uncanny which paints a puzzling yet gripping picture of the modern American family.

It’s a gripping, appropriately stifling experience, and the feelings — the fear, the disappointment, the unhappiness — hit home.

Although Karam’s mannerist stylistic choices might irk some viewers, they make a kind of sense by the end while his dialogue — overlapping, percussive, ultimately musical — is as exquisitely observed as it is immaculately performed by this cracking cast.

It is difficult to move from stage to screen. They are related disciplines but their divergence is perhaps as old as the building. The same care at the foundations is rewarded though, and where there is material to unearth The Humans has it in spades. It is emotional, powerful, perhaps achieving catharsis of a sort without actual resolution.

The impending sense of doom and the uncanny takes The Humans beyond miserablism... Very real issues are suffused with an oppressive, unearthly, compelling unreality.

The Humans isn’t a haunted house play as such but it shape-shifts into a work of the uncanny, which molests its characters with spectres they understand all too well... It gives you a family hanging on by a thread, and makes the careful tending of that thread feel so desperate it’s more than a little terrifying.

The Humans won’t work for many – it’s a slow burn with a mean ending. Some may insist that the story lacks cogency offstage, but it’s those frenetic, intimate and often senseless moments that justify its title.