“Humane” is a thought experiment sprung to bloody life, a cross between the trolley problem and dystopian extinction nightmares. Set in the very near future, it tries to tackle a cascade of ethical questions. Who counts as valuable? What does it mean to be good? If humans wreck the earth, what will we do to survive? Do we even deserve it?
Those are gargantuan questions, enough to power several graduate-level philosophy courses. But “Humane” wraps them in admirably small-scale trappings: a family drama with immensely high stakes. Just after widespread ecological collapse, every country on earth has shut its borders and has committed to reducing its population within one year.
In Canada, the target reduction is 20 percent, and to coax people into joining the effort, the government’s Department of Citizen Strategy has come up with language as euphemistic as its name. People who agree to be euthanized are “enlisting” in the “war.” Posters declare that “Enlistment = Opportunity,” because the families of those who enlist receive a substantial payout, enabling higher education or homeownership.
The volunteers tend to be older people, but they’re not the only ones being euthanized. It doesn’t take much to realize who else might be willing: prison inmates facing long sentences, terminally ill people, financially disadvantaged parents, undocumented immigrants whose families are promised a fast track to citizenship. But people haven’t been enlisting fast enough to reach the threshold. On TV news, some are beginning to discuss “conscription.”
“Humane,” directed by Caitlin Cronenberg (a daughter of the celebrated horror auteur David Cronenberg) in her feature debut, builds this world at a satisfyingly rapid speed, raising stakes so quickly that you’re left breathless as the implications sink in. (That also means some of the logical leaps — like how you’d get the whole world to agree to these measures — fade into the background, and that’s fine.)
The screenplay, by Michael Sparaga, sets up a society that hasn’t imploded yet but is about to, and is recognizably littered with the detritus of a discourse-obsessed culture very like our own. People talk about conspiracies, about the lies of mainstream media, about calling the crisis the “Asian collapse.”
Then the film shifts to more insular environs: a well-off family with a lot at stake. There’s a former war correspondent, Charles (Peter Gallagher), his celebrity chef wife, Dawn (Uni Park), and his four children — an anthropologist and conscription supporter, Jared (Jay Baruchel); a disgraced pharmaceutical chief executive, Rachel (Emily Hampshire); a piano prodigy and sober addict, Noah (Sebastian Chacon); and an aspiring actress, Ashley (Alanna Bale). Charles has called the family together for a dinner party. They arrive, unwillingly, because they all kind of hate each other. And of course, they soon find out that this gathering is not what they expected.
Unfortunately, the first twenty minutes or so of “Humane” are the most powerful. At some point, the pileup of hypotheticals starts to tax the imagination, while cutting into the kind of character development that might aid the audience in actually caring what happens to the family members. (Most of them are pretty reprehensible, too, which doesn’t help much.) A few twists and turns might have helped, but the story eventually starts to feel like it’s making up new rules every 10 minutes to throw us off, and not in a way that is satisfying. Chacon, playing the most three-dimensional character, is hypnotically watchable. But the rest of the family is hard to latch onto, and they feel oddly underdeveloped in contrast to the world they’re living in.
That said, it’s a strangely sticky story, one that lingered after the movie was over. Most of the scenarios “Humane” presents feel only a few clicks away from possibility, and the ethical questions it raises, while only shallowly explored, are disconcerting.
The most terrifying part of “Humane” is not the family drama as much as the societal one, and knowing that euphemistic language has often been used by modern authoritarians to control populations makes it all the more frightening. This isn’t a movie with much to say, but it’s the sort of thought experiment that will keep you up at night.
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