Human had its world première at FrightFest 2025, Friday 22 August
Human may announce its anthropological concerns in its title, but it opens with a collision between human and mineral – or more specifically with a video game called Rocks Are Cool, in which a jumping human avatar, caught between a rock and a hard place, is eventually undone by a big, unmoving stone. Unlike the rest of the film, this prologue is strictly screenlife, obliquely introducing a protagonist – or at least a reduction of her – by showing the games, apps, dating sites, film clips and social media through which she desultorily flips on her smart phone.
Here punky bisexual Dani Ferris (the amazing Jackie Kelly) is the sum of her likes and aversions, her attentions and distractions, as, like all of us, she lives out much of her twenty-first century life online. Yet she also craves real human company – offline and in the flesh – and is currently having to decide whether to meet her best friend Christina (Cecily Dowd) to get fucked up on molly, or to hook up with old flame Aaron (Jeffrey Decker) who is flirtatiously promising to do devilish things to and inside her as soon as his red-eye flight lands in LA. In all these mediated interactions, Dani goes through a gamut of human feelings and appetites – lust, longing, surprise, hunger, disgust, anger, fear – that are articulated in emoji form (as well as on her expressive face).
It is almost as though we are being invited to strip back all this electronic costumery to find the real human underneath. Meanwhile, offscreen, Dani may seem to be reclining cosily in her bedroom surrounded by the posters, tchotchkes and furnishings that make up her private interior space – but these are all in fact just another façade, a literal bedroom filmset in a Van Nuys studio whose creepy ‘good ole boy’ owner Jacky Verde (Brick Russell) has permitted Dani to stay there overnight while she works on indie film Elevated Popcorn. Once again, there is the sense that the real Dani is struggling to find her place in a world of artifice – indeed a highly self-referential world that she herself deems “cinematic af”.
“I dunno how you’re doin it but you are IN MY MIND tonight,” Dani will write to the airborne Aaron, as she observes that he keeps texting to her almost verbatim the very sentiment that she was just drafting to him. It is an uncanny connection – they are perfectly “in sink”, as Aaron puts it, in a typo that will resonate with later scenes involving a bathroom, a basin, and all manner of human effluent going down the drain. Human is, after all, a film where everything matters, and where casual little details from the beginning keep returning in altered form, like the flotsam and jetsam of waking life reconstituting themselves in a bizarre nightmare.
Apart from Christina, Aaron and the sleazily duplicitous Jacky, there is someone else seeking to enter Dani’s space in these wee hours – an unseen, insistent figure knocking hard at the studio door, who knows Dani’s name and who, like us, seems privy to all her online activity. “When I want to get in, I’m going to get in,” says the confidently menacing voice of Dani’s stalker – and so begins a long dark night of the soul, where, in a milieu dedicated to filmmaking, Dani will restage not just the shittiest elements of her life, but also scenes from westerns, action films, siege pictures and (especially) Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II (1987), including a severed hand with a life of its own (which responds to a hard kick with the Wilhelm scream). Dani is indeed, as she texts to Aaron, “livin that on set cinematic life 24/7”.
What ensues is an increasingly surreal scenario involving not only a lot of blood and excrement, cadavers and chaos, but also Dani’s confrontation with God, or the Devil, or her own inner tensions and turmoil. While Dani is a woman of many, often violently swinging moods (all carefully modulated by Joseph Holiday’s synth score), she has one sure way of balancing out her emotions – and exorcising her personal demons – which might just see her through the night to one hell of a hangover.
Writer/director Matt Stuertz (RWD, 2015; Tonight She Comes, 2016) has crafted an introspective exposé of a Lynchian ‘woman in trouble’ as she confronts – and possibly compounds – her various problems with psychodramatic, metacinematic escapism. This is vibrant, crazy filmmaking, creating a nocturnal adventure so unstable and hallucinatory that the viewer will struggle to pin down what is real, even as all the alienation effects, genre excursions and lysergic freakouts are anchored to an emotional honesty that is all too human. Which is to say the this popcorn movie, though elevated as a deep look into a woman’s beleaguered interiority, also rocks. 😂🤮😈
strap: That sinking feeling: Matt Stuertz’s metacinematic psychodrama is a long dark night of the soul that will make you 😂, 🤮 and 😮.
© Anton Bitel
