‘Human Factors’ Review: Paranoia Is a Family Business


From writer-director Ronny Trocker, “Human Factors” is a cold, stuffy home invasion drama where the threat vanishes like termites chewing on floorboards. Members of an estranged German family – two parents, Jan (Mark Waschke) and Nina (Sabine Timoteo), their teenage daughter Emma (Jule Hermann) and their young son Max (Wanja Valentin Kube) – are settling in their vacation home. when strangers burst out of the upstairs bedroom and escape through the front door. Nothing is stolen and no one is seriously injured. But the film relives the event from each character’s perspective, bringing together the mystery and aftershocks, and uncovering catastrophic emotional ruptures within the family.

The point is paranoia. Paranoia is also family business. Jan and Nina own a marketing company whose new client is a politician who wants to campaign on provocation and fear. Wherever Trocker’s camera goes, he finds characters looking scared of all the wrong things. He’s on the prowl like an objective voyeur, on the prowl, and he’ll do whatever he can to drive us crazy, too. (Director of photography Klemens Hufnagl.) A drunken fight can be an attack or a joke. A locked door seems secure, but adds to the sadness. At one point, Jan and Nina’s office windows are looted by a mysterious sticky substance. Why? And by whom? Trocker refuses to answer, continuing his restlessness until it turns into boredom.

The movie has a rigid intellectual tone to fail as a tense thriller. But the actors face the challenge of coexisting within them rather than sharing the scenes. However, the most clear-sighted observer turns out to be a domestic mouse—proof that this family, a microcosm of modern concerns, is more endangered by its silent dysfunction than by external enemies.

human factors
Not rated. Duration: 1 hour 42 minutes. In movie theaters.



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