HUMAN THEORIES (Tribeca 2026) – Review by Leslie Combemale
Part of life for city dwellers is the occasional eavesdropping on public transit, or the bizarre experience of running into someone you know, even in a different part of the city. Those are just two of dozens of occurrences captured in writer/producer/director Jess Zeidman’s fast paced and often amusing 70-minute indie comedy Human Theories. It is made up of 40 vignettes that might and often do happen in city life, in this case specifically New York City life.
Most of the scenes are less than 2 minutes in length, but capture things like strolls through urban nature, meeting people or near strangers on stoops or in bars, potential meet cutes or blind dates that end disastrously before they’ve barely begun, and other things to which most people can relate. There’s a thread from one to the other you may or may not catch, whether it’s one of the characters or even a prop from the former vignette. These scenes span from sweet to charming to incredibly awkward to downright awful, though never in any particularly dark way. Regardless of the little stories being told, many feel like they are shown from a decidedly female perspective.
There’s the pretentious musician talking up his band to his blind date. A guy mansplains his writing career to another writer, in what looks like a Tinder meetup, only to get up mid hookup to make ribs to eat and effectively tell her she’s only attractive when she shuts up. How about a guy and girl staring at the sky from a picnic bench as he waxes poetic about something nonsensical, to which she agrees to make it less awkward? Best, though, is the guy talking to his female fellow writer and suggesting his great new idea for a play about 8 women sharing their sexual assault trauma. He believes he’s just the writer to bring it to life.
Some are more gender neutral, like friends eating dinner out only to have the one dressed in short shorts and a crop top say it’s freezing. There’s also the three gals trying to take a picture together who ask a passerby to do it, then hate the results. A woman asks for feedback from an exiting roommate (struggling with her last box..you need help?) but doesn’t actually want to hear it. Two friends are out together at a book store, and one is clearly not actually listening to the other. Haven’t we all been in at least one of those scenarios? And yet, Zeidman frequently makes it uniquely New York by the locations she uses, which aren’t so much recognizable as iconic, but as places most folks who live in and around the city will recognize.
The music, more than the city itself, feels absolutely integral to the flow of Zeidman’s storytelling. It’s jazz, and feels as frenetic as the scenes it often accompanies. It may not be that viewers will feel changed or that the movie will even be that memorable. These very short vignettes will, however, flow by like a walk through a big city, which is different no matter how many times you take it. In that way, it really captures daily life in all its awkwardness, frustration, and, sometimes even, charm.
3 1/2 out of 5 stars.
