Adorable Humans takes Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales and turns them into something terrifying. Co-writers/co-directors Anders Jon, Kasper Juhl, Michael Kunov, and Michael Panduro take familiar stories and pull out the darkness hiding within them. The anthology film is split into four stories, The Dead Man, The Story of a Mother, The Snow Queen, and Auntie Toothache, each segment showing a different side of how people can spiral into breaking.
The Dead Man starts things off slowly. Death is not treated like a monster but as something quiet and haunting. The Story of a Mother is heavy, sad, desperate, and full of grief that turns into obsession. The Snow Queen is distant, dreamlike, and cold. Then Auntie Toothache ends everything with something gross, funny, and emotional all at the same time. It feels like the film finally lets go and allows its weirdness to spill over completely.
Despite being an anthology, the segments flow together nicely. The tone stays consistent through all four pieces. It visually remains consistent too, with pale light, muted colours, and a calmness that allows the fear to slowly settle in. There are violent moments, but they never come to shock for the sake of it because everything leading up to them feels so believable.
“…each segment showing a different side of how people can spiral into breaking.”
The acting throughout Adorable Humans feels authentic. Each actor is carrying something heavy, but no one pushes for emotion; you just know it is already there. The directors let the quiet do most of the work, making it feel like a slow descent into something painfully real.
What keeps the film so realistic and intriguing are the people inside it. Each story has characters who feel weighed down but still trying, a mother bargaining with grief, a man haunted by his own reflection, a woman who cannot tell love from control. The actors play it with real emotion; you can see everything in their faces. The directors never push them toward melodrama. The characters just exist while we watch, which makes their pain and suffering believable.
The music and sound work keep you on edge without drawing attention to themselves. It is quiet and steady, building the same eerie calm the rest of the film has. By the end, it feels less like four separate stories and more like one long reflection on how fragile people are.
Adorable Humans reminds us that fairy tales were never meant to make us feel safe. They were meant to tell the truth in a way we could handle. The directors show us that these fairy tales were actually never comforting. In stripping away that illusion, the film reminds us how much cruelty and beauty coexist in the same story. It is haunting, but also tender, like finding an old childhood book and realizing the monsters actually exist in real life.
"…reminds us that fairy tales were never meant to make us feel safe."
