Caitlin Cronenberg slashes her way into the family business with dark comedy Humane

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Caitlin Cronenberg’s family has a thing for blood.

Her father David possesses a devotion for the sticky stuff that has become an essential part of this country’s cultural heritage. And her older brother Brandon (Possessor, Infinity Pool) is well on his way to charting his own intensely gross course. But while the 39-year-old Caitlin’s feature directorial debut Humane is painted with its fair share of crimson, her own history of violence comes with its limits.

“We had a finite supply of blood within our budget – maybe a litre discrepancy. It’s partially true!” the director says with a laugh. “But I also didn’t feel the need to go too much into the violence, as it doesn’t feel tonally right for this film. I wanted there to be squeamish moments, like when you stick your thumb into a wound, but I didn’t want to take the audience out of the story. Everything had to be self-contained, and real.”

There is certainly a potent smack of reality to Humane’s speculative sci-fi trappings. While the film was written by Cronenberg’s friend and producer Michael Sparaga years before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, its story cannot help but arrive in theatres this weekend looking a distressing peek five minutes into the future.

Taking place in a world savaged by environmental collapse, Humane focuses on a fascist initiative launched by the innocuously named Department of Citizen Strategy: to reduce overpopulation, people are encouraged to be euthanized, with their loved ones promised compensation for the societal deed.

At the heart of the story is one wealthy family whose members descend into backstabbing chaos after their patriarch (played by Peter Gallagher) decides to sacrifice himself to government goons without reading the fine print of his euthanasia contract.

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“It’s meant to be a family drama taking place within a world going crazy outside the walls of the house,” Cronenberg says. “But it became more relatable over the course of time it took to actually make it.”

While Humane, which co-stars Jay Baruchel, Emily Hampshire and Enrico Colantoni, has its fair share of violence, the film’s set-pieces are mere flesh wounds compared to the head-splitting, body-ripping antics of Caitlin’s father and brother. Instead, the horror here is more existential than visceral, all pitched to a distinctly black-comedy wavelength. Think the toxic-sibling drama of Succession meets the chamber-piece antics of Arsenic and Old Lace.

Working on a tight shooting schedule of just 20 days – 17 of which were filmed inside a magnificently gothic 140-year-old mansion that sits atop Ravenscliffe Avenue in Hamilton – the director experienced what she calls a “pun-intended Crash course” in feature filmmaking.

“There were days when decisions needed to be made often and on the fly, and they weren’t always ones I liked making or that felt fair, because you want to give all the material equal time,” she says. “We shot all the violence of the back half of the film first. But then I realized tackling dinner-table dialogue scenes is so much harder than stunts.”

Cronenberg is no stranger to the on-set challenges of making movies – not only because of her lineage, but because she has spent the past two decades as an in-demand photographer, shooting celebrity portraits and production and publicity stills for films and TV series, including Baruchel’s own comedy Man Seeking Woman.

“It was a tight shoot, but that’s the course of business in Canadian independent film,” Baruchel says in a separate interview. “But I was psyched to see Caitlin blossoming in a feature-length medium that she hadn’t worked in before. She’s been a creature of the ecosystem, and it was very easy to be there with her.”

While Gallagher’s casting provides a nice bit of symmetry to Humane – the actor also played Baruchel’s dad on Man Seeking Woman – was Caitlin tempted to slide her own father into the role of a man dealing with his squabbling children, each fighting for a piece of his legacy? (David does have a quick voice-only role in the film; fans of his increasingly frequent acting work will have no trouble pinpointing it.)

“He did have an on-screen cameo at one point, but it got cut – though it was nothing to do with his performance! It was a pacing issue,” says Caitlin, noting that she’s already directed her father before, and in similarly morbid circumstances, in her 2021 short film The Death of David Cronenberg.

“He did tell me he was available if I needed him,” Caitlin says, “but I think I’ve seen enough of my dad’s corpse already.”

Review

Humane

Directed by Caitlin Cronenberg

Written by Michael Sparaga

Starring Jay Baruchel, Emily Hampshire and Enrico Colantoni

Classification N/A; 94 minutes

Opens in theatres April 26

There is an accidental, deeply unsettling prescience to Humane, the feature-length directorial debut of Caitlin Cronenberg. In this current Canadian era of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) and pandemic recovery, a story about citizens being offered the “choice” to kill themselves in order to reduce the burden on an overpopulated world feels almost too queasy, too on-the-nose to endure.

Yet Cronenberg offers a light touch to the material, spiking the deeply depressing dystopia with a sibling-rivalry battle royale that eagerly, if sometimes wobblily, shifts between sharp humour and slippery sentimentality.

If Cronenberg cannot hide the constraints of her budget – much of Humane takes place in a single setting, and the world-building comes through frugally assembled newsreel footage – then the director compensates by going all-in on casting. While there are only a handful of characters, nearly every role is filled by a top player in Canadian entertainment, including Jay Baruchel (perfectly despicable as a populist weasel), Emily Hampshire (as an even more grotesque corporate shark), and Enrico Colantoni (a government stooge with a heart of darkness). Even Peter Gallagher, the film’s lone American performer, slides into the proceedings with a kind of humble Canadian edge.

While Michael Sparaga’s script is too timid to leap outside expectations – its one big narrative swerve seems undercut by a final-second gag – Cronenberg displays a flair for making audiences care about the very worst people you might ever encounter. Humane might not be as gutsy – in all senses of the word – as the work of Caitlin’s father or brother Brandon, but it is powered by a wry sensibility all its own. B.H.