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‘Humane’ Review: Caitlin Cronenberg’s First Feature Is a Searing Domestic Thriller About Crimes of the Not-So-Distant Future
In a future where state-sanctioned euthanasia is the answer to climate change, four furious siblings have two hours to decide which one will die.
In “First Reformed” (2018), the director Paul Schrader juggled so many filmmaking tropes — it was like “Diary of a Rolling Country Thunder in the Winter Light” — that he deftly converted eco-terrorism into art-thriller meditation. He has summoned all four of them to meet for a dinner party: Jared (Jay Baruchel), a divorced weasel who’s prominent in the government and goes on TV to be a bureaucratic cheerleader for the enlistment program; Rachel (Emily Hampshire), a seething corporate snake; Ashley (Allana Bale), an aspiring actress whose career has turned out to be nothing, leaving her miserable; and Noah (Sebastian), Charles’s adopted son, a bohemian nervous wreck who’s a piano prodigy and also a recovering addict who killed someone in a car accident (he’s got a prominent scar on his cheek). Cronenberg stages it with a fearless matter-of-factness, with telling nods to issues of private contracting and corporate surveillance, and with a vivid eye for the schemes and secrets hidden in the Victorian nooks and crannies of that house.
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