2024 | rated R | starring Jay Baruchel, Emily Hampshire, Enrico Colantoni, Peter Gallagher | directed by Caitlin Cronenberg | 1 hr 33m | 2 out of 5 stars |
Humane is a movie with a lot of nerve and not in a way that it’s risky or pushing the envelope. This is a movie that plays very much in the acceptable political lines while being completely clueless to the world around it. It thinks it is saying something bold but the actual real world dystopia around it has outpaced the film’s clumsy, attempted satire.
To combat a climate crisis in the near future, Canada has adopted a mandatory euthanasia program in which family members will volunteer their service to be executed by the government to meet global population reduction quotas. Former news anchor Charles York (Peter Gallagher) summons his children to their lavish mansion for dinner it is with the alternative motive of informing them that he plans to volunteer himself so they won’t have to. However, when the agent (Enrico Colantoni) from the Department of Citizen Services shows up to carry out the procedure, he may have more up his sleeve for the York family than following orders.
A lot of nerve. This is the kind of movie that could and should be described as a satire of Trudeau’s Canada if any mainstream review outlet had the gumption to call out the famously authoritarian prime minister. From a pop culture perspective Canada has gone from Mary Kills People where Caroline Dhavernas dodged the cops to provide suffering people the right to die to Futurama suicide booths for the mildly depressed in barely over 5 years. The film’s depiction of a climate crisis is that in which the sun is so hot people have to use umbrellas outside to cover from it – not the Snowpiercer style apocalypse that might warrant such immediately extreme rationing. You’d think it would be easier to incentivize people to not have kids than it would be to convince them to kill themselves. Especially since we’ve already done that.
But Humane is ultimately less concerned with it’s central moral question, as it is distracting us from that with a class-warfare satire where we are supposed to delight in watching rich people fight each other to the death. Jay Baruchel plays arguably the sleaziest character in a room full of them, an anthropologist working with the government to craft the suicide volunteer legislation, making sure there are loopholes for himself, his family and those like him of course. We have Emily Hampshire (Schitt’s Creek) as the ruthless daughter who fights to keep her daughter out of this, Sebastian Chacon (Emergency) plays the family black sheep and recovering drug addict and Alanna Bale rounds out the siblings as Sebastian’s biggest confidant who is too sweet for all this mayhem.
As the film’s protagonists decide/fight over which one of them should die to satisfy the government quota, the movie diffuses that tension too by throwing the light of suspicion of Colantoni’s DCS agent who seems to be enacting a revenge on the rich than something strictly within the guidelines. The movie is so concerned with the mechanics of the film’s thriller/twist elements that it doesn’t stop to acknowledge the obvious satirical points at play, mainly that none of these people actually care about or believe in the laws they are tasked to enforce. The world is supposedly on fire, but that’s someone else’s problem.
Director Caitlin Cronenberg (showing none of the bold, pronounced screen statements of sibling Brandon, who himself just knocked out a far superior class warfare satire with Infinity Pool) uses the premise as a springboard to make a standard single-location battle royale film, as the entire film takes place in the first few rooms and just outside of the York estate. But it doesn’t carry the themes through. I appreciate, conceptually, endings like this where nobody is likable and everyone is out for themselves. I just wish it wasn’t as executed as incomprehensibly sloppy as this one. This is tame stuff. You know it’s gutless stuff when the real world is more dystopian than your dystopian thriller.