‘Humane’ Review: An Ethical Crisis and a Dinner Party

“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.