HIFF Report 2: THE HUMANS, COW, NO STRAIGHT LINES, & WHAT JOSIAH SAW

The 30th Heartland International Film Festival rolls along, and I’ve got another eclectic bunch of films that shows off its world-class centerpieces, variety of documentaries, and chilling horror films. Oh, and cows.

THE HUMANS (Stephen Karam)

“Men always feel that they have to fix things for women, but they’re not doing anything. Some things just can’t be fixed. Just be there, somehow that’s hard for all of you.”

These lines, uttered plainly by Annette Bening’s Dorthea in 20th Century Women, may rattle through your brain in the early goings of The Humans. As a family gathers in the youngest daughter’s new apartment, the patriarch hangs back, muttering and taking stock of the bubbled paint and cracked walls. Caulk, he mentions throughout the film. If he had some caulk he could seal this place up right.

There’s clearly a lot more he wants to fix than the run-down building, and the film becomes a waiting game to find out what foundation-cracking disaster he’s sitting on. But first, grandma must be wheeled into the dining room, toasts given on both levels of the ominous house, and Thanksgiving dinner served. Throughout the evening they bumble around the youngest daughter’s new boyfriend and the absence of the eldest daughter’s ex-girlfriend, bickering and chastising and comforting each other as only people who know you inside-out can. The familiar flow of the gathering can be comforting at times, but always something goes bump in the night, returning us to the portentous gloom.

I do mean that literally; the upstairs neighbor bangs around and light bulbs flicker out, very on the nose ways of building tension that one imagines are holdovers from the play on which the film is based. On rare occasions they cross the line into being pushy, but for the most part writer/director Stephen Karam isn’t too precious about adapting his own Tony-winning play. The confined setting (you barely leave the interior of the apartment) is the only thing that gives away its origins. Otherwise, the movie leans heavily on filmic details to build its dread-filled mood: barely perceptible push-ins, the play of light on the crinkled walls, and small emotions that flash across each of the extraordinary actors’ faces.

Most prominent of the ensemble cast is Richard Jenkins as the troubled father, who plays his unease so palpably that it’s heartbreaking to see it overlooked by his daughters. Beanie Feldstein and Amy Schumer have wonderful adult sibling chemistry, and their comic timing comes in handy as they clomp around what they think is just another awkward family gathering. Jayne Houdyshell gets the last of the meaty roles as the mother who’s clearly in on whatever is going on while Steven Yeun and June Squibb hover around the edges, one a promising new member and the other a beloved staple on the way out.

The latter two may seem less significant, but they’re present to remind us that even our most stable bases are constantly changing. Death, birth, and marriage make for inevitable turnover in families, as Jenkins alludes to in a hilariously inappropriate toast. Eventually even their traditions will come to an end.

That tenuousness is what makes watching The Humans so uncomfortable, but it makes up for the unpleasantness by living up to its name. All of the people in this ratty apartment are so delicately human, and the ties that bind them have nothing to do with being able to fix each other’s problems and everything to do with the simple act of being there for as long as they possibly can. It’s a simple, honest truth about family, and in a twisted way, it’s a comforting one.

COW (Andrea Arnold)

At first glance, an Andrea Arnold-directed documentary about cows may seem out of left field. The filmmaker behind American Honey and Fish Tank did a documentary? And she followed around a cow? Once you sit with it, though, the puzzle pieces click into place. Her narrative films often eschew carefully choreographed moments in favor of raw emotion, the instincts of fresh actors plucked from the street paired with pop hits creating scenes that feel so vividly alive that the meandering her films do around these bravura moments barely matter.

She couldn’t get the cows to dance to Rihanna, but the methods she uses to grab your soul is pretty easily transcribed to documentary filmmaking all the same. She knows where to put a camera to make us consider her subject carefully, and she’s not afraid to unleash a song that knifes you in the heart. Yes, Cow succeeds in being one of the more emotional films of the year, not through any anthropomorphic pandering but in doing what Arnold does best: taking in the world in all its possibility and its cruelty.

At the center of the film is a dairy cow on an English farm. There’s nothing special about her; she gives birth, gets milked, chews on grass. If you’re looking for a documentary that claims to illuminate the extraordinary inner life of an animal humans use as a product, this isn’t the film for you. Instead, it takes a harder road to make a more complicated point. It presents this cow plainly, no razzle-dazzle, often in tight shots that either look directly into her placid eyes or with part of her head in frame, the rest showing whatever she’s gazing at. The repeated activities of getting hooked up to be milked and getting an arm shoved inside her occasionally stress her out, but just as often she placidly follows the direction of the farmers, a cog in a very large, very regimented system.

The film does ask you to question whether she’s happy, particularly in moments where she struggles to navigate the metal and grime of the barns and is separated from her calves, but more importantly it pushes you to question if you’re happy with her life. Whether you believe we were granted it or obtained it, humans have become stewards of the Earth, and we have implemented all sorts of systems that impact the lives of the creatures around us. We have the ability to make them as gentle or as cruel as we want, and it’s easy for them to lean into the latter if we never really look at them.

Cow takes us through one of these systems, not from our point of view but from the animal most affected, and gives us a taste of what it might be like. From there, it nudges us to consider what we could be providing, if we could make this world more gentle. It doesn’t preach, but when “Skinny Love” kicks in, you better get out the tissues.

NO STRAIGHT LINES: THE RISE OF QUEER COMICS (Vivian Kleiman)

“All you need is a pencil and a piece of paper,” claims Jennifer Camper, one of the primary subjects of the documentary No Straight Lines. That’s all you need to make a comic. It’s a claim that makes the medium feel very open, particularly in the age of online publishing, that has unfortunately been proven false due to the barriers we’ve grafted onto the industry.

Most of those barriers, as with any commercial art form, comes from censorship, which has quashed attempts by a whole range of people to represent themselves within the panels on the page. Director Vivian Kleiman takes us through how queer artists defined convention and scraped together an industry within the industry, which makes for a fascinating piece of history that will have plenty of familiar parallels to anyone familiar with censorship in the arts.

She focuses her story on a handful of groundbreaking comics who were instrumental in creating or keeping afloat different aspects of queer comics, and the great joy of the film, outside of the history lesson, is its sly observation of the differences between them. Camper comes off as the kind of brash person you expect to lead a creative revolution while Alison Bechdel seems content to ramble about pens. Rupert Kinnard speaks bluntly about the intersections between sexuality, race, and disability while Howard Cruse expounds on the many times he found himself breaking down some new barrier. In a documentary, one always wants to get a feel for the subjects, which this does in spades (with plenty of help from adorable pet cameos), but it goes a step further in getting across one of the fundamental aspects of any minority group: that there’s a wealth of diversity within them, and not everyone wants or achieves the same kind of success.

If you want your tales of true scrappiness, you get plenty of that from the early days of the underground movement and later when the print industry crashed and zines rose. Your mainstream success, as it were, comes from Bechdel, who movie fans should know from the eponymous, tongue-in-cheek feminism assessment the Bechdel test. That bit of pop culture fame came from her strip Dykes to Watch Out For, but you’re more likely to know of her work through Fun Home, which was a bestselling graphic novel and then a hit Broadway musical (and now I have Ring of Keys stuck in my head).

All of which makes for a fun survey, but there’s a sobering fact that becomes inescapable by the end: none of this history is old. The people featured in the documentary really did create queer comics, and they’re alive to be interviewed for a documentary released in 2021. The medicine for this blow, as it so often is when looking at queer history, is how quickly it exploded. Younger comics, who pop in from time to time, are an even more numerous, eclectic bunch, and their stories of growing up with these comics and having them as examples to build on proves that the recently fledgling movement is here not only to stay, but to thrive.

WHAT JOSIAH SAW (Vincent Grashaw)

Horror has a particularly prominent set of tropes and clichés you want to see again and again. The ominous local, the hinted-at backstory, the isolated, lonely man. Their presence is what makes the genre comforting in its way, signifies that you’re in for a safe way to work through the horrors of the world without having to confront them directly. 

That’s why I wasn’t concerned when What Josiah Saw started off with several piled on top of each other. These are simply the hallmarks of the genre, and the expansion from them is what determines whether the film falls into tedium or grips your chest. Unfortunately, the movie never stops layering them on, and pretty soon they become so numerous that, even as the narrative constantly shifts gears, the direction the film is going in becomes inevitable.

The film is presented in four parts, one for each of the children in the fabled Graham family and one for the inevitable fireworks of their reunion. I include the last part because it’s not really a spoiler; the inciting incident that brings them together appears early in the film, and the rest is intended to be a dread-filled march to its conclusion. The exact horrors they confront when they return to the family farm should be the real mystery, but its first section, which follows the son who stayed home, leaves little to the imagination.

On paper the setup should work. The problem is that director Vincent Grashaw pitches things at a screech, utilizing a pushy score, severe camerawork, and over-the-top performances from Scott Haze and Robert Patrick (playing father and son) to heavily imply the revelations to come. It doesn’t exactly spell things out, but it doesn’t leave much wiggle room for the story to develop.

The second section, which follows elder son Eli (Nick Stahl), transitions into a southern-style thriller with a thankfully deliberate pace. Eli’s mistakes are so numerous that they threaten to bring his life to an end, and most of our time with him revolves around a last-chance mission to pay back his hefty debts. That takes him to a traveling carnival, which is a shot of nostalgia for fans of Carnivàle like myself. It’s also, unfortunately, a shot of cringe, because the carnival is run by a group of treacherous Romani people, one of many harmful and unnecessary tropes the film plies in for shock value. Despite this, the section manages to deliver the kind of controlled dread the rest of the film aspires to, in no small part thanks to Stahl’s proven ability to play an adamant, disreputable lout.

The last two sections are almost not worth noting, with the sister getting a hysterical woman-style suburban nightmare that is also too heavy-handed and the siblings’ reunion exploding like someone set off an entire fireworks show at once. It would be exhausting if it wasn’t so tiresome, and in the end there’s not much of a point to this tale of deeply wounded souls. It exists simply for a thrill, forgetting that horror needs more than a series of grotesque discoveries to really sink its claws into you.

That’s the second of three reports from HIFF. Which film intrigued you the most? Let us know in the comments!