‘Human Factors’ Review: Paranoia is the Family Business

“Human Factors,” from the writer-director Ronny Trocker, is a chilly, airless home-invasion drama in which the threat is out of sight, like termites chewing at floorboards. The members of a disengaged German family — two parents, Jan (Mark Waschke) and Nina (Sabine Timoteo), their teenage daughter, Emma (Jule Hermann), and young son, Max (Wanja Valentin Kube) — are settling into their vacation house when strangers burst from an upstairs bedroom and escape out of the front door. Nothing is stolen and nobody is seriously hurt. But the film repeatedly relives the incident through each character’s point of view, piecing together the mystery and its aftershocks and exposing calamitous emotional fractures within the family.

Paranoia is the point. Paranoia is also the 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, it finds characters who seem to be afraid of all the wrong things. The lens skulks like a voyeur and does what it can to frazzle us, too. (Klemens Hufnagl is the director of photography.) A drunken brawl might be an assault or a prank. A locked door looks safe, but adds to the sorrow. At one point, Jan and Nina’s office windows are pelted by mysterious goo. Why? And by whom? Trocker refuses to answer, sustaining the unease until it becomes ennui.

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. The most cleareyed observer, however, turns out to be a pet rat — evidence that this family, a microcosm of modern anxieties, is more imperiled by its silent dysfunction than by outside enemies.

Human Factors
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters.