General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Being Human (1994 film)

Being Human is a 1994 drama film written and directed by Bill Forsyth, in which Robin Williams plays a man named Hector in five separate stories set in different periods of history, from the Bronze Age to contemporary New York.¹ Produced by Robert F. Colesberry and David Puttnam for Warner Bros., it was a large-budget production that opened poorly in the United States in May 1994, was reworked by the studio before release, and became the last film Forsyth made with Hollywood backing.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Bill Forsyth, the Scottish filmmaker known for Gregory's Girl and Local Hero²
Premise	Five vignettes, each starring Robin Williams as a man named Hector in a different era: a Celt (caveman), a Roman slave, a Scottish crusader, a man shipwrecked in Africa, and a modern-day New Yorker¹^•⁴
Release	Limited US opening May 6, 1994 on 224 screens, grossing $764,011; wide release the same date per Rotten Tomatoes²^•¹
Box office	$1.3 million gross in the United States¹
Budget	Reported as $20 million by The Independent and MUBI, $40 million by Cinegraph, and $50 million by Hollywood in ToTo⁵^•³^•⁶^•⁷
Runtime and rating	2 hours 2 minutes; rated PG-13 in the United States¹
Reception	54% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (13 reviews), a Metascore of 33, and 5.3/10 on IMDb¹^•⁸^•⁹

Spoilers

Premise and structure

The film is a collage of five stories, each featuring Williams as Hector, a man in his forties journeying through life in varying relationships with more powerful associates, a woman, a lover, parents, and usually children.¹⁰ The settings range from prehistoric times, ancient Rome, and the Middle Ages to contemporary New York.¹⁰ According to the synopsis on Rotten Tomatoes, Hector is a single human soul allowed to experience five distinct lives across history, reborn successively as a Celt, as a slave in Rome, as a Scottish crusader, as a man cast away on African shores, and as a present-day New Yorker; even as the same souls, among them his lover and his children, repeatedly surface in his vicinity, he keeps repeating identical errors.¹ Time Out notes that Hector may not be reincarnated exactly, but each story feeds on what has gone before: after losing his family in the Bronze Age, he is separated from them in every other tale.¹¹

Recurring motifs include fear and anxiety, superstition and sacrifice, the nature of partnership, how men treat women and other men as chattels, water-crossings, the difficulty of filling other men's shoes, and the abused integrity of a name.¹¹ The Criterion, an Indianapolis weekly, described the film's concerns as including religion, or the concept of priesthood, and humanity's usually futile efforts to cope with the eternal mysteries.¹⁰ A female narrator, played by Theresa Russell as the Storyteller, frames the stories; in her words, "In the end, isn't every story all the one story?"²^•¹²

Production

Origins. Forsyth conceived Being Human while editing his 1989 film Breaking In; MUBI's Notebook primer reports that the idea came to him during a phone call with Bill Murray.⁵^•³ When Robin Williams came on board to play five different people called Hector, Forsyth chose Hollywood financing over European money.⁵ Filming began in Scotland in 1992, and also took place in Morocco, England, New York, and California.⁵^•⁷

A disagreement over the meaning. Forsyth recalled a fundamental difference of opinion with the studio: "For me, this film was about the fact that for individuals nothing changes and nothing ever will, whether you're a caveman or a lawyer. The studio thought experiences do change you and so Hector would get better as he went along." He sold the project to Williams as a mainstream movie, and Williams joked in a Scottish accent whenever they had trouble, "It's OK, it's a mainstream movie."⁵

The recut. When filming completed, the film had an initial running time of 160 minutes.⁷ According to Time Out, Warner Bros. sat on the film for a year trying to find a recut that would make sense, then gave it back to the director, who added Theresa Russell's voice-over narration as a sign of good faith.¹¹ Hollywood in ToTo reports that the studio had the film cut down to two hours and added the narration before releasing it in the spring of 1994, four months after Mrs. Doubtfire.⁷ Forsyth publicly described the result as a project that got out of his control.¹³ At a specially organized screening at the Glasgow Film Theatre in 1994, he began the question-and-answer session by apologizing to the audience for the film.¹⁴

Release and box office

The film opened in limited release on May 6, 1994, on 224 screens, grossing $764,011, then fell 64 percent the following weekend to $278,326.² Tracking polls by the National Research Group showed only 43 percent of test audiences were aware of the film during its second week in release, against a 60 to 65 percent average, and about 1 percent of audiences of all ages listed it as their first choice of a movie to see.² Its total United States gross was $1.3 million.¹ The film received minimal theatrical distribution in both Britain and the United States; the Edinburgh Festival was, per The Independent, the only opportunity UK audiences had to see it on the big screen.¹⁴^•⁵ Later releases were on video in Argentina (September 15, 1994) and Hungary (December 8, 1994), with a Swedish television premiere on June 20, 1998.¹⁵

Reception

Critical response was mixed to negative. The film holds a Metascore of 33, classified by Metacritic as generally unfavorable, with 4 positive, 5 mixed, and 9 negative reviews out of 18 counted.⁸ On Rotten Tomatoes it stands at 54 percent from 13 critics.¹ The Washington Post's Rita Kempley called it "a whimsically offbeat, stubbornly upbeat tour of man's progress as seen through the eyes of five guys named Hector," while Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called it "misconceived, misguided and a completely miserable viewing experience," singling out the voice-over narration read by Theresa Russell as the film's most irritating aspect.⁸^•¹⁶ The critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, writing in the Chicago Reader, defended it as one of the few truly original and personal commercial movies to have appeared that year.⁴ The film critic Adrian Martin found the film adrift for its first two hours but judged that Forsyth's understated style survived the studio interference, with at least two of the five stories, especially the one featuring Anna Galiena, quite moving.¹³

Cast

Robin Williams plays Hector in all five stories.¹² The supporting cast includes John Turturro as Lucinnius, Anna Galiena as Beatrice, Vincent D'Onofrio as a priest, Héctor Elizondo as Dom Paulo, Lorraine Bracco as Anna, Lindsay Crouse as Janet, and Theresa Russell as the Storyteller.¹² Netflix's listing also credits Robert Carlyle and Bill Nighy.¹⁷

Aftermath

Being Human was Forsyth's final film with Hollywood backing, and it effectively ended his American career.³^•¹⁸ In a 1994 interview, Forsyth said of the experience, "I got the ending I wanted but I lost on virtually every other thing," and he and Mike Figgis both vowed never to work in Hollywood again.⁵ A PhD thesis on Forsyth records that prolonged exposure to American financiers and producers had, in his own retrospective account, reduced his perception of what film could be.¹⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026