Humane is the debut feature length film from Caitlin Cronenberg, daughter of David Cronenberg. Her brother Brandon has already released two titles, Possessor and Infinity Pool, both of which follow pretty closely in his father’s footsteps. Possessor is replete with body horror and prosthetic gore while Infinity Pool feels part of the same shadowy universe as (the second) Crimes of the Future. Caitlin has a more original voice, largely eschewing body horror for a dystopian vision of the future. The premise of Humane is amazing, so good that it sustains the film even when the narrative peters out and eventually goes nowhere. While much of the screenplay was middling, I came away wanting more of its world, and more of Caitlin’s (hereafter Cronenberg’s) distinctive voice.

Since so much of the power of Humane lies in its premise, the first act is easily the most inventive and intriguing. We open at an unspecified future date when the climate crisis has made population reduction a priority across the world. At the “Athens Accords” the United States made a pledge to reduce its own populus by 20% and has developed a Department of Citizen Strategy (DOCS) to take on that mission. People are asked to enlist to euthanise, as warfare turns from a geopolitical to a national and environmental phenomenon. This allows Cronenberg to riff brilliantly on one of the recurring trops of cli-fi: the dissonance between reproductive futurity and planetary futurity. Time and again, climate texts confront the fact that global warming cannot be combated through the rhetoric or microcosm of the nuclear family – if anything, the proliferation of families, and the equation of family and society, is part of the problem. In Humane, parents enlist to euthanise to create a better world for their children, whether that means providing them with a cooling planet or acquiring the funds to buy a home, since enlistment is remunerated pretty comprehensively by the federal government.

Cronenberg also evokes a future world where the sun has become as oppressive and as uncomfortable as rain – a new iteration of film soleil for the era of climate catastrophe. Much of the action takes place inside, where people shy away from windows that are covered with protective coating. In one of the few outside scenes, a character jumps out of the driver’s seat of her car, runs around to get a jacket to drape over her head, and eventually resorts to one of the many sun umbrellas on display, amidst a torrential deluge of light. I’ve taken to using umbrellas in summer (more, probably, than in winter) and occasionally get a few strange looks on the street. Humane confirmed my sense that this will become more common and that we will soon come to see sunlight as a more inhospitable weather event than rainfall.

Amidst those big dystopian co-ordinates, Cronenberg also turns a withering (and distinctly Canadian) gaze upon American culture. We learn that there is a euthanasia “draft” on the horizon and that undocumenteds are encouraged to enlist so that their kids can be fast-tracked for citizenship. Just as sinister, enlistment officials are private contractors and operate without direct government oversight. They emerged, as a class, from for-profit prisons, where they maximized and then exhausted their profits by enlisting as many inmates as possible. These contractors adhere to a strict policy: “We are not falling below our quota, no way no how.”

Cronenberg translates that premise into narrative by way of a wealthy family, the Yorks, who meet for a dinner party. There, Patriarch Charles (Peter Gallagher) informs his children Jared (Jay Baruchel), Rachel (Emily Hampshire), Noah (Sebastian Chacon) and Ashley (Alanna Bale) that he and his second wife Dawn (Uni Park) have decided to enlist that very evening. The kids are understandably stunned, all the more so when Charles goes through with the procedure, Dawn backs out and skips the house, and contractor Bob (Enrico Colantoni) tells them that they have to produce a second enlisted body, while placing his security team around the perimeter of the house until they decide who they want to sacrifice. Of course they can technically back out of enlistment but this will mean that all their bank accounts are frozen, they will go to prison for life and their name will be put on a government “Coward’s List,” a little like a post-overpopulation version of stolen valour. Rachel’s daughter Mia (Sirena Gulamgaus) will then be put into the foster care system, which by all accounts is a slippery slope towards enlistment.

The rest of the film is an increasingly frenetic chamber drama as the family tries to decide who is the most expendable. There are some touches of body horror and a few genuinely suspenseful moments but for the most part the narrative lags, culminating with a non-ending that feels like Cronenberg has run out of ideas. The screenplay also turns more satirical at this moment and doesn’t always land, with some topical references that are fairly on the nose, and at times devolves into a one-dimensional privilege critique. Yet the broader premise and the wider world of the film is fascinating and was enough to sustain me right to the end. In that respect it’s a bit like the first film in the Purge franchise (although not as a good) insofar as we’re presented with a gloomy wealthy family drama that gestures towards an extraordinary expanded universe but doesn’t quite open us up to it. I’d love to see Cronenberg give this franchise a second crack and really run wild with it. As it stands, there’s something just a touch polite (Canadian?) about her dystopia –a sense it hasn’t been fully unleashed.