Humane

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.

It’s solid, and at its best it’s an impishly entertaining little thriller. But all the talent in the world can’t overcome the feeling that there is more here to be mined, if only Humane had dug just a little deeper.

If Brandon absorbed daddy dearest’s predilection for body horror and new flesh, then Caitlin has clearly studied his razor wit and grasp of metaphorical social commentary.

This isn’t a movie with much to say, but it’s the sort of thought experiment that will keep you up at night.

Humane doesn’t want to be a hard-hitting drama about moral equity in an unequal world that nobody escapes alive, it wants to be a satirical — and increasingly basic — thriller about the evils of financially incentivized health policies in a world where nobody deserves to die, and it’s hard for it to succeed on those terms without caring about which of its characters ends up in Bob’s other body bag.

When the film firmly goes off the rails in the second act, [Cronenberg] still showcases an ability to play up tension as the four children hunt each other in the expansive mansion. In isolation, the bifurcation works but, taken together, it suggests an underbaked concept that was never fully realized and, alternatively, a slasher that never makes its characters feel human.

Caitlin Cronenberg vests her images with an eerie, confident power, but that’s more evident in her examinations of the frictions between the characters, and not so much in the tapestry of murder and mayhem that ensues.