Stephen Karam's film, based on his own play, begins with shots of the sky through the view of geometric shapes formed by tall apartment buildings converging near the top. The effect is immediately disturbing -- the buildings themselves are deep in shadows, giving the unfortunate aspect of being down in a deep well, and making you desperate to climb out.
It's an unsettlingly claustrophobic opening, echoed in the almost comically narrow hallways and foyers of the prewar apartment building in New York's Chinatown, where the rest of the film takes place, setting the uncomfortable tone for the cramped emotional drama to come.
Brigid (Beanie Feldstein), and live-in boyfriend Richard (Steven Yeun), are welcoming her family, including her dad, Erik (Richard Jenkins), mother, Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell), sister, Aimee (Amy Schumer), and mostly senile grandmother, Momo (June Squibb) for a Thanksgiving feast at the couple's newly rented, and barely furnished, downtown apartment, which is anything but accommodating.
Beside the single-track hallways, and the lone, refrigerator-size bathroom, the rooms themselves are also nearly barren. The few sources of light keep flickering, and the building is filled with a jarring series of loud noises, from a jumpy neighbor above them, to sounds of a trash compactor, and what sounds like a clothes dryer, constantly filling the empty rooms with their discomfiting din. Featured as such an ill-worn character unto itself, it's depicted as one of the more distressing home spaces on film since the abandoned house in "Fight Club."
Erik and Deirdre, coming over from Scranton, Pa. (where property values are far more affordable, Erik helpfully reminds his youngest daughter), try to make the best of it, but Karam's camera keeps pointing out the apartment's abundance of glaring flaws -- bulging, water-damaged walls, rusted pipes, worn-out fixtures -- via Erik's point of view in a way that suggests the frustration he feels seeing everything on the verge of decay.
He's not wrong. Nothing seems to work properly in the place. Even the windows, staring out bleakly into a cave-like courtyard from which the film's initial imagery stands, are smeary and battered. Still, the family soldiers on with reasonably good cheer, at least at first. Aimee, come up from Philly, is enduring a difficult year, losing her law firm job, ending a long-term relationship, and dealing with a recurring bout of colitis bad enough to send her into surgery a few weeks hence, but she bonds with her sister, on the odd moments they can catch alone, and despite her heartbreak, enjoys being with her family. The same cannot be said of her sister and mother, who seem to harbor a long history of discord, and her father, who, when not making jokes and speeches about the sanctity of family, sits morosely drinking beer after beer.
Like the stage production it's based upon, the apartment is set on two floors, connected by a difficult, winding staircase, which offers each of the family members the opportunity to get away from everyone else, reflecting on their own miseries and anxieties alone. Karam sets these reveries in growing darkness and shadow (as a visual analogy to despondency and alienation, the gradual series of light bulb blow-outs becomes hauntingly effective), the images becoming more abstract, as seen through thick beer bottles, or just past a pigeon feather stuck to a window frame.
Eventually, of course, it comes out that certain family members are holding back dark secrets from one another -- and what better time to reveal such things than a holiday gathering! -- that only come out at the end, but this isn't so much a narrative of anxious building, like so many other such family-gathering dramas of this ilk. The unnerving atmosphere is set very early on and, despite the family's tendency toward making jokes and laughing uproariously, is mostly unrelenting. Whatever is revealed is of vastly less importance than the atmosphere itself (reinforced by Karam's interesting way of putting characters in total shadow, or even in the background murmur of another room altogether for some of these more dramatically charged moments).
It's not a film about the sudden dissolution of a family after a dramatic revelation: The bleakness and decrepitude were already there, now they're just lit up in the dim glow of a flickering, low-watt bulb. Everyone is getting older, of course. Momo has almost completely lost her mind (though in one of the film's more openly moving moments, Deirdre re-reads to the group an encouraging email her mother-in-law wrote to the two daughters shortly before losing herself to the fog of infirmity), age-old regrets and tensions haven't been resolved, and aren't likely to happen, and it already feels too late for them to recoup what they've already lost. They are barely hanging on, as each of them becomes aware of their fragility in their own way. The decrepit fixtures and ceiling stains in the apartment aren't just ugly anomalies; they're harbingers.