Human Resources (2021)

Human Resources takes a wonderfully mundane setting—a hardware store—and turns it into a pressure cooker of dread, where every aisle feels like it’s hiding a secret and the walls themselves seem to listen. Braden Swope’s debut has the scrappy, sincere energy of filmmakers swinging for the fences, and that ambition becomes part of the fun as the mystery tightens and the horror creeps in around the edges. Hugh McCrae, Jr. anchors the film with anxious, relatable vulnerability, while Sarah José brings a sharp, skeptical counterweight that keeps the tension grounded even as things grow increasingly uncanny. It’s not a slick, big-studio scare machine, but if you enjoy indie thrillers with real commitment and a haunted-at-work vibe that builds patiently toward confrontation, this one is easy to root for.

Human Resources wants to mash up a workplace mystery with behind-the-walls supernatural horror, using an anxious new hire in a creepy hardware store as the audience’s way in. The problem is it rarely locks those pieces together, so the story can feel uneven, with pacing that drifts and writing that doesn’t always earn the big “shocking” turns it’s aiming for. If you need tight plotting, consistent tone, and a thriller that escalates cleanly, this may test your patience more than your nerves. Still, there’s a scrappy debut energy here, and the setting has a grimy, eerie vibe that suggests the director has ideas—just not yet the execution to make them hit as hard as they should.