We Are What We Are Review

• 12th Oct 2010

A crazy old man stumbles and dies, unnoticed, in a busy shopping mall. Janitors clear away his body and mop up the mess. The water dries. Pretty young girls carry on shopping. The tone for We Are What We Are is indelibly set.

This old man has left behind a down-and-out family of cannibals, a wife and children who must now deal with their grief, the challenge of finding their next meal and their shifting relationships in this post-papa subsistence.

“We’re monsters,” cries the mother with haggard anguish as the family begins haplessly and helplessly to hunt. Although not a sight for the squeamish, it’s not the monstrosity of this family we’re constantly reminded of in this film, it’s their humanity.

This is a film about basic human hunger – for sustenance, yes, but also our bodily desires, our yearning for power. Two brothers struggle with each other for control of the family and with themselves for control of their sexuality. Their sister starts to discover and ineptly wield her strength as a young woman, while her world-weary mother watches her own desperately ebbing away.

When the gaze is on the family, director Jorge Michel Grau creates dark and vulnerable drama, beautifully and soberly framed. The siblings are often shown just sitting, waiting, within a nostalgically domestic yet sickly-green-tinged interior, where the only sound is that of a hundred old clocks relentlessly ticking.

It’s quiet, almost mundane. We don’t experience anything as glamorous as suspense, or as thrilling as horror – just a deadening, dread-laden comprehension of the inevitable.

When the gaze widens to encompass Mexico City, the intimacy of the dysfunctional family is contrasted against the bleakly bright exteriors of a dysfunctional society – tacky colourful marketplaces, fluorescent glowing subway stations, dusty motorway underpasses where live the homeless children who scatter like antelope when hunted. It’s starkly, scarily, vividly real.

Amid bustling urban decay, corruption, prostitution and poverty are all matter-of-factly exposed with the same grim determination as a young cannibal butchering her first catch. All without condemnation, and with a strangely sweet warmth and humility. The fight for survival is conveyed with bemused resignation. We are what we are.

The choice of genre in telling this story is laden with critique; the subversion of that genre is laden with empathy. In his sophisticated debut, Grau has created a film that shocks us not with its brutality, but with its compassionate sense of futility.

Kathy Alys