FrightFest review – Human (2025)
Dani (Jackie Kelly) settles into bed with her phone, deftly having conversations by text message with possible hook-up Aaron (Jeffrey Decker) – who’s on a plane due in past two in the morning – and gal pal Christina (Cecily Dowd), with whom Jacky gossips and freeform chats. An oddity is that Dani’s cosy room and bed has only two walls, and is tucked in the corner of a vast, shadowy space recognisable as a film studio. Is this a theatrical meta-movie touch? Or is she really sleeping in a film facility owned by Texan big hat Jacky Verde (Brock Russell)?
For a long first act, Dani is alone onscreen in Human, and becoming jittery about a banging at the door – and a sinister voice who makes ominous pronouncements and seems to be able to see her. Is the place hooked up for vision with secret cameras? Or is Dani’s unseen nemesis all-seeing and all-powerful. Jacky gives Dani the heads-up on where he keeps ‘Lil Boo’, a sawn-off shotgun, and he says that he’s on his way over with ‘Big Boo’, which is presumably a much bigger weapon – though his accent has started slipping. On her own and possibly slipping out of her mind, Dani battles forces intent on getting into the place and doing her harm – which takes writer-director Matt Stuertz’ film out of the realms of low-key urban menace into a kinetic update of the sort of agonies piled on Bruce Campbell in the Evil Dead films … Dani finds herself battling a severed hand and her own rebel body, just like Campbell’s Ash – but her struggles are even more extreme, to the extent that we wonder whether this scenario isn’t more like Chuck Jones’ Duck Amuck – the film where Daffy is tormented by an animator who turns out to be Bugs Bunny – and the heroine/protagonist is genuinely at war with a puppetmaster who is in her universe the equivalent of a God.
Human is a wild, funny, bizarro picture and the pixieish Kelly, acting with every fibre of her body and soul, is extraordinary. It makes an interesting contrast with Jimmy and Stiggs, which is almost the male rights activist version of this same vision.
Discussion
No comments yet.