In his favorite comic book series, explains a guest at a small Thanksgiving dinner in “The Humans,” the horror stories that an alien species tells are all about us. Humans with their strange rituals and embittered histories, their layered subtext and sneaky barbs — where else does true fear lie?
For this month’s Thanksgiving edition, these films observe families together and in crisis, smiling for photos and despairing behind closed doors. Sometimes, there’s even the possibility of finally seeing each other clearly.
‘Force Majeure’ (2014)
Stream it on PlutoTV.
There’s that age-old prompt about what things someone would take from a burning house. Also, your family is there — so, who or what would you grab?
Ruben Ostlund’s “Force Majeure” deploys this philosophical quandary during a family vacation — a nightmare date movie if there ever was one — then observes the aftermath with an acerbic glee. Here the burning house is actually an avalanche, a controlled one set off near a ski resort patio until it gathers such speed and strength it becomes a real one. Thomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), husband and father of two, panics and grabs his phone and gloves in the mad stampede. The kids are left for his wife, Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), to save.
They all emerge unscathed, but the pretty veneer of their family, and Thomas’s position as the patriarch, is shattered. More telling, Thomas is unwilling to admit what happened. The family’s ensuing disintegration exposes not only the farce and fragility of masculinity but, whether we admit it or not, our entrenched ideas around gender ideals.
‘Another Year’ (2010)
Stream it on Roku.
When Gerri and her friend, Mary (Lesley Manville), look off toward Ken (Peter Wight), a middle-aged drunk, Gerri (Ruth Sheen) announces sadly, “Life’s not always kind, is it?” Mary agrees, but it isn’t clear if she can see that she’s one of life’s victims, too.
It’s the kind of plainly brutal assessment that strikes at the heart of Mike Leigh’s film, which observes Gerri and Tom (Jim Broadbent), a content couple in their 60s who tend to their garden across the seasons of one year while spending time with friends, including Mary and Ken, who falter with the tougher hands — loneliness, regret — they’ve been dealt.
It’s a remarkably simple film, and yet still it devastates. In one quietly bracing shot, Leigh captures a brief tableau of Tom holding a friend’s newborn baby; he’s telling her sweetly about his own time decades ago as a parent, before the camera tracks to Gerri nearby, who is listening to another friend talk about his wife’s worsening sickness.
So life goes. Another year passes, and some folks trudge on. Things get worse, things get better. Things change, and sometimes they don’t.
‘Rachel Getting Married’ (2008)
Stream it on PlutoTV.
You may never witness an occasion of such vibrant joy and oppressive grief as the weekend when Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) gets married. Brimming with emotional complexity and a brilliant naturalism, Jonathan Demme’s film opens on Kym (Anne Hathaway) getting out of rehab and heading straight to her sister’s wedding.
Her arrival sets off a pressure cooker of past traumas, resentments and anguish. Kym is a compulsive saboteur of herself but also her sister’s spotlight, a fact that forces ugly confrontations between them and their tenderhearted father (Bill Irwin, wonderful) and absent mother (Debra Winger). Recriminations soon expose the great scar of a death that has wounded the family.
Hathaway gives a performance of fully embodied brokenness, but there’s also stealthy nuance to the kind of erratic pain she emanates. She and the wondrous ensemble speak to Demme’s uniquely sensitive creation: one of total emotional catharsis — outbursts and frank reckonings — but also quiet, buried history, communicated solely through glances and gestures.
‘Tokyo Sonata’ (2009)
Stream it on Tubi.
When Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa) loses his corporate job, he actively hides the news from his family, ashamed of his perceived castration as the family head. He gets home early and sneaks into the house through the back door, and in the days that follow puts on his business suit to wait in serpentine unemployment lines and for soup kitchen lunches. Keeping up the lie soon unravels a family whose ties were loosening to begin with.
Here, the horror auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa turns his gaze on mundane and, in some ways, more frightening realities: a family in crisis from a recession and the alienation of a modern world where, for better or worse, our ingrained values clash with the precariousness and cruelties of global capitalism.
Kurosawa seems to see in this family a larger story of pervasive and confused paternalism. As Ryuhei struggles to process the compromised image of himself as an authority figure, we hear in the background news reports of mighty America moving through the Middle East, and soon, Ryuhei’s disillusioned son joins the U.S. military.
‘The Humans’ (2021)
Stream it on Tubi.
In Stephen Karam’s dynamic adaptation of his Tony Award-winning play, the Blake family gathers in their daughter’s dingy Chinatown apartment in New York for Thanksgiving, but amid the family jokes and toasts, their conversations pulsate with mounting unease. As the parents, racked by money troubles, push off revealing some recent troubling news, the camera observes walls distended with leakage, lightbulbs fizzling out and mottled surfaces and reflections that fracture the faces of the Blakes into alien forms.
Karam uses an occasionally heavy hand to render this middle-class horror show of spoken and unspoken frictions, but “The Humans” succeeds via a strong cast, with Richard Jenkins, Jayne Houdyshell, Amy Schumer, Beanie Feldstein and Steven Yeun. Prudently, Karam’s sketch of this family is one that isn’t particularly dysfunctional; their conflicts and anxieties are perfectly quotidian, their love very real.
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