Winner Best Picture Dragon Con Short Film Festival (2013) Long Island International Film Expo (2013) Today’s film is The Human Race written and directed by Paul Hough. The plot is summed up in the movie’s tag line: “Race or die.” Basically 80 random citizens from all walks of life find themselves mysteriously together in some kind of race where they hear the rules spoken inside their heads in their own languages. “Race or die” and oh yeah, “Stay off the grass.”
And we know they’re serious because our would–be protagonist, a girl who we see lose her mother to cancer, find out she has the same cancer (curses God), then miraculously finds out she’s had a full remission (thanks God), steps on the grass immediately and we see her head literally explode. So, the movie’s not about her. Obviously.
But that’s the beauty of this film. It’s unpredictable. What I’d like to talk about here is how this film exemplifies “metaphor”. There’s a line in the film: “These rules don’t make sense.” And another character replies, “They do to whoever made them up.” I think this is the heart of what this movie is exploring. The most obvious metaphor the movie embodies is that of the race they are placed on with that of Religion.
If you want to explore philosophical questions like “Who makes up the rules” we live by, you need a metaphor. And in this film that’s the race. There are plenty of religious images that beg a religious interpretation. There’s a priest who says they are in Purgatory and are being told to “stay on the path.” He thinks God is testing them. The literal path that winds through a church is the most difficult part of the race path.
Chinese brother and sister. Among the first victims of the Cyclist.
Rules are all good for an organized society, but only when everybody agrees to follow them. This film shows what happens to our morality when self-preservation is on the line. It’s interesting how a Cyclist becomes the antagonist simply because he wants to survive. He causes the deaths of others (by lapping them…one of the other rules…you get lapped twice, you die) and we don’t like that, but when he is killed we are not really upset. Because we have been manipulated to see him as the bad guy when all he wants to do is survive (as we all would in that situation). He makes the conscious choice to lap a pregnant women as she sits talking to her 8 month unborn child. We’re meant to see it as a cruel choice, but in the end, it’s the only choice he can make. Race or die becomes kill or be killed. The Cyclist says, “I’m sorry. I won’t put my life in anyone else’s hands.” As a religious metaphor, this would be the atheist or agnostic perspective. The question becomes, “Why would we put our lives in the hands of a God who creates us in these situations and seems deaf to our prayers?”
Even a disabled war vet falls victim to the Cyclist.
There’s a deaf couple, for a while I saw them as the Adam and Eve future of the race; however, Adam does the unspeakable and Eve handles him. What’s messed up is that we root for her when she causes Adam’s death…as if killing is laudable over attempted rape. This film is definitely messing with our sense of morality when it has us applauding the deaths of those we see as “bad” guys, even when the good guys are killing the bad guys…they remain good because we need to cling to the idea that goodness can still exist in a world gone crazy like this one. But this movie doesn’t allow that kind of sentiment for very long. We also see the deaf girl as a victim, but she quickly becomes a vigilante in her violence (if this is Eve, then the forbidden fruit is the power to kill).
In the end she is literally running into the white light. At one point she asks, “Why is God doing this to us?” I can imagine many of us have asked that question after times of hardship or tragedy. And like our lives, there is no answer, no resolution. I’ll not offer up any spoilers here, but suffice it to say the ending is as unexpected as the premise. It adds a twist on the movie title that’s almost maniacal. And it works.
When the deaf girl prays that she hear music before she dies (since for the first time she is hearing the numbers of the people who are killed), we see her prayer go unanswered. We see a group of men who just decide to start “grassing” people. They wrack up a high body count before they are stopped. And where is God during all of this? Did he put them in this situation? Is he allowing this or even aware of this? It calls to mind the end of the Robert Browning poem "Porphyria's Lover" about a man who has killed the woman he loves by strangling her with her own hair:
"And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word."
These are the questions we ponder about our everyday lives, much less this kind of supernatural situation. The only clue we ever get before the ending is one shot from the perspective of what appears to be a satellite (or God’s view from above).
"And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word."
These are the questions we ponder about our everyday lives, much less this kind of supernatural situation. The only clue we ever get before the ending is one shot from the perspective of what appears to be a satellite (or God’s view from above).
Hough shows us a world too easily prodded into nihilism. But that’s not metaphor if you read the current events. Humanity has always been the plaything of the gods. Or the other side of that horrible coin is the gods are indifferent to our suffering. This excellent film explores through metaphor these philosophical questions while giving us some gnarly head explosions. The film loses points for production values, but that’s budgetary limitation for sure, not artistic choice or effort. For a film that took over four years to film on and off depending on the finasnces, it's good work.
This one I highly recommend for those who don’t mind the gore. And who wouldn’t enjoy rooting on a one legged man to save The Human Race?
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