Sundance Review: ‘Human Factors’ is a slick and engrossing whodunit

At the beginning of Human Factors you settle in thinking it will be your standard home invasion thriller. Albeit a good one, shot and directed with a real sense of how to create tension and suspense. But director and writer Ronny Trocker keeps us guessing.

A French- German couple Nina (Sabine Timoteo) and Jan (Mark Waschke) manage an advertising agency where they are passive aggressively and silently feuding about a new controversial client. Things at home are not much better. Their teenage daughter (Jule Hermann) is skipping school and hanging with a rowdy crowd into violent pranks. For a respite they take a sojourn to their country cottage and that’s where the home invasion happens. Then things take an even sharper swerve. The younger son (Wanja Valentin Kube) accuses the dad of hiding to avoid the invaders. The mother, already resenting her husband for taking on a client without consulting her, starts questioning their marriage. You think at this point that the film is becoming Force Majeure redux. But think again, Trocker has lots more on his mind than remaking the 2014 Swedish comedy directed by Ruben Östlund.

From then on all bets are off. Did any of the things we witnessed happen? Perhaps. More fascinating than finding who did it or if it happened at all is watching this family confront all the tension seething below the surface. All four of them see what happened differently. Trocker keeps shifting the point of view, presenting that night from each of the four leads’ perspective. Each time uncovering more of what transpired and complicating the narrative. The audience is disorientated not knowing whose side to take. They could all be lying to further their own agenda.

The performances are uniformly strong. Waschke has a disquieting nonchalance that works in tandem with how little his character says to make him always suspect. Timoteo charts as surprising an arc as the film’s shuffling viewpoints. At first she’s all steely determination; a mama bear protecting her family. Slowly Nina becomes an unreliable narrator yet she manages to hold on to character and story even as Nina can’t hold on to her family. Hermann and Kube credibly avoid precociousness though their characters’ perspectives are not as deeply investigated as the parents’. 

A tense mix of family dynamics story, psychological thriller and whodunit Human Factors succeeds at all the genres it tackles. This is engrossing and tension filled storytelling. You won’t be able to look away.

This review is from the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Image courtesy of Sundance Institute.