All of David Cronenberg’s children are now out there making Cronenberg movies.  Eldest daughter Cassandra has several assistant-director credits that include the Cronenberg classic eXistenZ, and a slow trickle of high-style, high-concept sci-fi horrors have established son Brandon as a buzzy provocateur of his own right over the past decade.  Now, Caitlin Cronenberg has entered the family business with her debut feature Humane.  Set in a near-future America that’s struggling to keep its remaining citizens alive after Climate Change disaster, Humane‘s central hook relies on a government program that incentivizes voluntary euthanasia as a means of population control.  The government has rebranded suicide as a heroic act of “enlisting” in “the war” against humanity’s extinction, littering the streets with propaganda posters that valorize impoverished parents who sacrifice themselves to brighten their children’s future with a hefty payout.  It’s the kind of post-Twilight Zone thought experiment where the characters are more symbols than people, representing various social ills and grotesque points of view that help flesh out the central thesis more than flesh out their internal lives.  In that way, Humane is maybe more indebted to the Canadian horror tradition of the Cube series than it is to the Cronenberg family legacy, give or take a couple last-minute indulgences in dental & bodily gore that cater to the true Cronheads out there.  However, the film is surprisingly juicy if you’re invested in the larger Cronenberg nepo baby project, given that one of its major driving forces is catty, extratextual humor about spoiled brats who live in their famous father’s shadow.

Because it is a relatively cheap, made-for-streaming production, Humane cannot afford to depict the wide-scale Climate Crisis devastation that has accelerated America’s violent disdain for its own citizens.  Instead, the movie shoehorns all of the political hot topics its premise touches on (class, racism, immigration, MAGA populism, COVID denialism, environmental collapse) into rushed conversations during a single-family dinner, only hinting at the wider scale misery of the world outside their home in gestural images (UV-deflecting umbrellas, bureaucratic death squads, newscasts warning of an imminent draft for the “war”).  Peter Gallagher stars as the family figurehead: a retired, wealthy news anchor who invites his children to his home for dinner, where he announces that he and his wife plan to enlist as an act of self-sacrifice.  His children loudly rebel, squabbling with their father about the narcissism of his decision as an act of familial PR and squabbling amongst each other about who deserves what share of their imminent inheritance.  The movie takes a fun turn at the top of the second act that further isolates & escalates the fervor of that familial argument, and I refuse to spoil that twist here even though it arrives fairly early in the runtime.  What’s much more important is the obliviousness & selfishness of the nepo babies who both loathe and profit from their father’s legacy, weaponizing phrases like “What would Dad think?” to knock each other down in their vicious fight for dominance.  It’s darkly funny enough on its own merits to make Humane worth seeking out when it hits Shudder this summer, but it feels even more essential once you start extrapolating what it indicates about Caitlin Cronenberg’s home life (as filtered through collaboration with producer & screenwriter Michael Sparaga).

Not everyone will be interested in watching a feature-length subtweet about Cronenberg family gatherings, but I appreciated how Humane‘s rich-people-problems humor lightened up its political speculation about our planet’s grim future.  I felt similarly about Brandon Cronenberg’s latest film Infinity Pool, which balanced out its broader satirical sci-fi premise about wealth-class privilege with the director’s extratextual nepo baby handwringing about imposter syndrome and writer’s block.  Cronenberg’s kids could be making exact photocopies of their father’s legendary body horrors, but they’re instead undercutting that impulse with some acknowledgement & self-interrogation of their own creative, privileged circumstances.  They’re also just having fun.  I found Infinity Pool perversely hilarious and Humane surprisingly playful, especially in scenes featuring Enrico Colantoni as a bloodthirsty bureaucrat who interrupts the family dinner with plans to collect the bodies the government was promised.  It’s a small film with big ideas, not allowing its Canadian TV production values to get in the way of its thematic ambitions.  It’s also self-consciously silly, though, affording comedic actors Jay Baruchel & Emily Hampshire equal opportunity to play morbid court jesters alongside Colantoni as Gallagher’s rotten, ungrateful children.  There’s a lot to enjoy here, and I hope Caitlin Cronenberg gets to leverage her last name for more high-concept satires in the near future.  The only shame, really, is that we weren’t privy to the real-life dinner conversations that likely resulted after her family saw an early cut.  They’re fun to imagine, at least.

-Brandon Ledet