RogerEbert.com by Matt Zoller Seitz
Trocker is deft at creating situations that go right up to the edge of blatant symbolism or metaphor, bit resist the urge to pitch themselves over the brink and become blatant and simplistic.
Critic Rating
(read reviews)User Rating
Director
Ronny Trocker
Cast
Mark Waschke,
Sabine Timoteo,
Marthe Schneider,
Wanja Valentin Kube,
Hassan Akkouch,
Spencer Bogaert
Genre
Drama
Nina, Jan, and their two children head to their holiday home on the Baltic Sea for a relaxing vacation. But a mysterious home invasion shatters the peaceful mood and sparks tension among the family members as the event is revisited from each person’s perspective.
RogerEbert.com by Matt Zoller Seitz
Trocker is deft at creating situations that go right up to the edge of blatant symbolism or metaphor, bit resist the urge to pitch themselves over the brink and become blatant and simplistic.
Slant Magazine by Wes Greene
Despite the mystery of the home invasion becoming increasingly tangential, Human Factors remains a compelling puzzle-box.
Screen Daily by Jonathan Romney
This deviously constructed puzzle film plays cat and mouse (or to be exact, pet rat) with the viewer, yields subtly disconcerting insights into the fault lines of bourgeois life, and features terrific lead performances from Sabine Timoteo and Mark Waschke.
Film Threat by Alex Saveliev
A bit too somber and detached for its own good, Human Factors nevertheless marks another strong entry from a filmmaker who – after several shorts, a documentary, and one other feature – is just getting started.
Los Angeles Times by Noel Murray
Trocker’s insights into a family crumbling due to a lack of trust aren’t all that fresh or keen, but his movie is tense and absorbing regardless, because he and his cast excel at dramatizing the lingering resentments and passive-aggression that foul the air between loved ones.
CineVue by Matthew Anderson
A challenging and very well considered inspection of familial disintegration, featuring strong performances, Human Factors is a solid entry in the Sundance World Cinema Dramatic Competition.
The Playlist by Christian Gallichio
While Trocker attempts to connect the form to the content of the film, he gets lost in his formalist conceits, never creating fully realized characters to hold the weight of his structural choices.
The Film Stage
The well-directed sophomore narrative feature ultimately loses itself, placing more importance on its central theme of interpersonal interactions while firmly rejecting a more fleshed-out, compelling story.
The Film Stage by Diego Andaluz
The well-directed sophomore narrative feature ultimately loses itself, placing more importance on its central theme of interpersonal interactions while firmly rejecting a more fleshed-out, compelling story.
The New York Times by Amy Nicholson
The tone is too rigidly intellectual for the movie to succeed as a tense thriller. But the actors are up to the challenge of not so much sharing scenes as coexisting within them, particularly Timoteo as the embittered wife who roils like a teakettle that has been welded shut.
IndieWire by David Ehrlich
Trocker’s second feature (following 2016’s “The Eremites”) never quite manages to make good on its gamesmanship and only allows itself to have any fun once it’s sure that nobody else is.
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