Sundance: "Human Factors" review
Friday, January 29, 2021 at 2:00PM by Jason Adams
How weird are those first moments when we realize our parents are people? Not super-humans, not saints, not actually the best baker of cakes or baseball player in the world — when the freckles on their fingers come into focus; the scabs and flabby knees. Mom stares at the wall for too long; Dad knee shakes when he’s trapped in thought. This disillusionment of experience, of aging, rides hand in hand with the becoming of our own selves — their armor dissolves down in order to make us stand stronger, separate.
There is an inciting incident at the near-start of Ronny Trocker’s strategically incisive Human Factors that seems to set the white upper-middle-class family unit at its center spinning of their axis...
The parents Nina and Jan, teen girl Emma, and adolescent boy Max, head to their seaside vacation home for an off-season breather, only to find once they get there a home invasion in process. Or so mother Nina (Sabine Timoteo) says; she’s the only one who sees or hears anything. But is Mom a reliable narrator? Everybody’s got an opinion.
And Trocker presents us with all of them, as the film flashes back in time to not just show us where everyone in the family was at the moment of the incident, but stepping back further and further into what brought each person to the house in the first place, and then out toward what happens after. It’s a structure reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s little remembered television hour-long Incident at a Corner, where the Big Bang reverberations of a car accident are felt both backwards and forwards in time, with everything seemingly pulsing out from the moment of impact.
For instance father Jan (Mark Waschke) was coming back from a walk around the property taking a phone call when we hear his wife screaming inside the house — who was he talking to? And a la Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure does he take maybe just a smidge too long to react? The way it plays out from his point of view as opposed to his son’s, who’s watching him from the house upstairs window, is very different. But then as we step back further in time and learn more about weirdo little Max (Wanja Valentin Kube) his motivations become murkier as well. It’s funny how the accumulation of information only seems to source a certain cloudiness. Miscommunications from here to hell and back.
If this sounds as Michael Haneke to you as it does to me — the family vacation interrupted by a home invasion calling to mind Funny Games, and the cold clues to an unknowable mystery only unraveling certainty rather than strengthening it something straight out of Cache — that seems on purpose. Aesthetically and emotionally Trocker’s film almost lives in the same universe as that Austrian authority on clinical-eyed apathy; it’s definitely most interested in picking these people apart. And buried deep it’s got a pitch-black cosmic joke squeezing at its heart, resuscitationally-speaking.
This zombie family’s only lurching around on borrowed time, and everybody’s masks are coming off — one mask made of skin comes off, and one of paper-cache in its place, since what is growing up but retro-fitting yourself to your surroundings? Outside Eden, on the other side of the cocoon, is the chaos of adulthood, where you can, heaven forbid, see where everybody is coming from. It was so much simpler when things were simpler, wasn’t it?
Human Factors both understands and eviscerates that impulse it stirs in us — a conservative shrink toward womb-safety has its costs. Watch the way the film smartly creeps at small-town xenophobia, introducing outside scapegoats — the police investigating the home invasion keep accusing foreigners with no provocation — only to yank away those possibilities at every turn. No, son, no daughter, this call is coming from inside the house. And further, the knowledge of that in itself is nobody's savior -- will we press toward new amalgamations? Or simply shift our feet into our parent's place when they turn to dust?
Reader Comments (2)
Jason, has MNPP ever devoted a gratuitous post to Mark Waschke? His stage and TV work cry out for it. ;-)
Mark Waschke is the well-fed German version of the British Jude Law. 😉