The Humans — Thanksgiving dinner with an extra helping of angst

In an apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown that’s spacious but desperately in need of damp-proofing and a good clean, new residents Brigid (Beanie Feldstein) and Richard (Steven Yeun) have only just moved in with a fraction of their possessions. Nevertheless, they’ve gamely invited Brigid’s Pennsylvanian family to eat Thanksgiving dinner off paper plates and plastic cups.

Everyone’s trying their best to be cheery, but anxieties, resentments and secrets swim and seethe just below the surface like angry koi. For starters, there’s a small class divide between the older and younger generation. Brigid’s school custodian father Erik (Richard Jenkins) and devout Catholic mother Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell) don’t quite get the kids’ tastes or life choices, like why they want to live in expensive Manhattan at all when the same money would get them a mansion in Scranton. And even though their eldest daughter Aimee (Amy Schumer), a lawyer, lives closer to home in Philadelphia, the only way Deirdre can show support for her being a lesbian is to send her press clippings about gay kids who have died by suicide. Meanwhile, Erik’s dementia-addled mother Momo (June Squibb) mumbles incoherently in the corner about someone being a “bitch” or a “black” and everyone just pretends they don’t understand what she’s saying.

Given the single-location setting, it’s not in the least surprising that writer-director Stephen Karam first launched this as a stage play. Indeed, he directs the camera to stay put often and observe the action from a distant room for many minutes longer than you’d expect, as if we were watching the show in some fluid, immersive theatrical space. At other times, the camera lingers on the view through pebble-glass windows or offers inexplicable extreme close-ups of ceiling cracks while the score by Nico Muhly, seamlessly intermeshed with the sound design, heightens the sense of dread.

Gradually, it all builds up a horrible, skin-creeping sense of foreboding that something terrible is about to occur. The surprise is that the Bad Thing has already happened. Although Karam’s mannerist stylistic choices might irk some viewers, they make a kind of sense by the end while his dialogue — overlapping, percussive, ultimately musical — is as exquisitely observed as it is immaculately performed by this cracking cast. It’s as if Samuel Beckett had written a sitcom.

★★★★☆

In cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from December 26