Stephen Karam’s Tony-winning play makes the leap to film with ease, an extraordinarily well-acted, uncomfortably intimate look at a family at Thanksgiving

There’s a surprising urgency to Stephen Karam’s adaptation of his Tony-winning play The Humans, a vitality one might not expect from a film that sounds like something we’ve seen many times before. Not only is the set-up of a dysfunctional multi-generational family descending on a Manhattan apartment for Thanksgiving as dilapidated as most Manhattan apartments themselves (the post-American Beauty world of indies was forever damaged by the increasingly cliched quirky family subgenre) but the decision to film a one-location, one-act play (especially by the person who originated it on stage) can often be the result of vanity rather than necessity.

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