This cinematic adaptation of Stephen Karam’s The Humans quite possibly improves on the play
“Keep saying things to me”
Winner of the Tony for best play, Stephen Karam’s family drama The Humans now finds itself adapted for screen and directed by the man himself too. I wasn’t the biggest fan when I saw it onstage at the Hampstead Theatre but it gains a lot through this treatment, Karam and cinematographer Lol Crawley able to really amp up its innate eeriness.
For though it is set over a fractious Thanksgiving family gathering, it follows many of the tropes of a horror movie to explore the idea that perhaps what is haunting these guys, is the noxious way in which they treat each other. In real time and in the trapped confines of a lower Manhattan apartment, an ace cast of six really get into it.
