Human Fac­tors – first-look review

It starts with a break-in – or does it? After a French-Ger­man fam­i­ly trav­els to their vaca­tion home, wife Nina (Sabine Tim­o­teo) swears she saw men dash through her home and then dis­ap­pear, although they curi­ous­ly didn’t take anything.

Son Max (Wan­ja Valentin Kube) was upstairs, prepar­ing to clean his pet rat Zorro’s cage; daugh­ter Emma (Jule Her­mann) was out par­ty­ing with her friend; hus­band Jan (Mark Waschke), who was right out­side on a work call, heard a shriek com­ing from the house but only paused for a moment before con­tin­u­ing when it appeared that all was well. The only thing that’s in evi­dent dis­or­der is a miss­ing Zor­ro, whose cage was knocked over amid the chaos and now lays on the ground, empty.

Ron­ny Trocker’s Human Fac­tors is a por­trait of a fam­i­ly in qui­et cri­sis, struc­tured around the afore­men­tioned home inva­sion, and how this short-lived expe­ri­ence illu­mi­nates the house­hold at the cen­tre of it. Less about how the fam­i­ly is affect­ed by the inci­dent, the film focus­es more on the inti­mate details in their imme­di­ate reac­tions, the seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed fall­out, and the days lead­ing up to it, using the break-in as an anchor point to expose the frac­tures that were already there.

Jan and Nina run a suc­cess­ful ad agency in Ger­many, whose acqui­si­tion of a polit­i­cal client forces Jan and Nina at odds. Though the cou­ple had always main­tained to one anoth­er that they would nev­er allow their com­pa­ny to get involved in pol­i­tics, Jan went behind Nina’s back to do so. Mean­while, Emma has been tru­ant at school, and Max is ner­vous­ly prepar­ing for his school’s upcom­ing concert.

In order to break from these mount­ing ten­sions that sur­round them, Jan and Nina take them­selves and their kids to their vaca­tion home for the week­end. But the poten­tial for a bliss­ful time away is shat­tered by the bewil­der­ing break-in, as the film depicts the alleged crime first through Jan’s eyes, then rewinds time twice to show it through Max’s and then Emma’s – the lat­ter of whom wasn’t even there for it.

A film that requires a lot of patience for an extreme­ly mea­sured pay-off, Human Fac­tors is an inter­est­ing exer­cise in lux­u­ri­at­ing in ten­sion, but nev­er build­ing to that which relieves it. On the con­trary, the film ends on a note that sug­gests the family’s strife has only just begun; the dif­fi­cult road that lies ahead of them is some­thing the audi­ence will nev­er bear wit­ness to.

The promise of a nicer, big­ger apart­ment for Nina, Max and Emma reveals that Jan will not be join­ing them; the arrival of Nina’s broth­er Flo (Daniel Séjournéand) and his part­ner, vis­it­ing for sup­port soon after the inci­dent, expos­es Jan’s sim­mer­ing homo­pho­bia; Emma is miss­ing school and lies to her father about par­ty­ing the night of the break-in; Max becomes with­drawn fol­low­ing Zorro’s disappearance.

And under­scor­ing the entire nar­ra­tive is a through­line of unre­solved xeno­pho­bia, of unwant­ed out­side vis­i­tors caus­ing dis­tur­bance rather than it com­ing from with­in. Human Fac­tors is a bru­tal­ly tense yet restrained look at the unspo­ken rup­tures with­in ide­alised upper-mid­dle-class life, and how the lit­tlest details give way to breach­es that don’t need to be reached through an all-con­sum­ing calamity.