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We Are What We Are

Ben here, back from a long, mostly restful Thanksgiving weekend. With our blitz of reviews from the Starz Denver Film Festival, November has been a busy month here at The Movie Advocate. We hope you enjoyed the coverage as much as we enjoyed writing it. December is shaping up to be possibly even bigger. I’m not giving anything away yet, but we have some really, really cool stuff planned, so be sure to check back. Before we roll over to December, however, we have a few loose ends to tie up, starting today with a leftover review from the Starz Denver Film Festival’s Watching Hour lineup…

We Are What We Are opens with an anonymous old man falling dead on the sidewalk in front of an upscale boutique in Mexico City. The cops are baffled when the autopsy results reveal that the man has a human finger digesting in his stomach. This leads a bumbling detectives eager for a big break to attempt to solve the mystery on his own. Meanwhile, the man’s wife and children are frantic when they discover that the patriarch of their clan is dead. The family are ritualistic cannibals, you see, and their father was in charge of leading the rituals. With their mother (Carmen Beato) distraught and irrational from the death of her husband, a game of power and manipulation plays out between siblings Alfredo (Francisco Barreiro), Sabina (Paulina Gaitan), and Julian (Alan Chávez). The family’s power structure is evolving, and the transition is messy and tense.

Unfortunately, however, We Are What We Are commits the greatest crime a movie about an urban Mexican cannibal family can commit: It’s kind of boring. How can you make an urban Mexican cannibal family drama boring? By stripping away about 90% of that conceit’s cool implications, leaving a whitewashed skeleton of a movie, with, ahem, no meat on its bones.

For a movie about cannibals, there is shockingly little cannibalism in We Are What We Are. Everyone in the family keeps talking about the importance of the ritual, but in the entire movie they never actual perform one. When things start to fall apart for the clan as the detective picks up their trail, we are not very clear on the stakes. These characters speak about the ritual with great reverence, even mania, but the context is absent. Are they part of some ancient cult or religion? Is this a cultural thing, where if they don’t carry the tradition on, the ritual will die out? Do they get sick if they don’t eat human flesh? None of this is explained. I don’t fault the movie for not spelling everything out, but it's problematic that this lack of definition spills over into the plot. Wouldn’t it be better to show a successful ritual early on in the movie so that the stakes are higher when things take a turn for the worse? We Are What We Are truly suffers from a lack of significant plot points. In two hours, we go from point A to point B. What this movie really needs is a point C, D, E, and F. What we’re left with feels slight. This is especially frustrating because the material left unexplored seems so compelling.

The movie rests entirely on the shoulders of the four lead actors, and the family dynamic is We Are What We Are’s crowning achievement. Carmen Beato is simultaneously ferocious and fragile as the mother of the clan. Francisco Barreiro is understated as Alfredo, the "responsible" son who tries in vain to fill his dad's shoes. His adventures trying to find fresh meat are some of the movie's best moments. Alan Chávez as younger sibling Julian plays it hard and crazy. It's all in the eyes: he sees other humans as food. Rounding out the family is Paulina Gaitan as Sabina. She has less concrete power, but wields the power of suggestion like a champ. Watching these four volatile personalities play off one another is pure fireworks.

The movie finally delivers some brief but deliciously twisted violence toward its conclusion. The people in the audience I saw the movie with were divided in their reception. About half the audience took the mutilation and butchery very seriously. The other half were laughing their asses off at the ridiculous presentation of over-the-top ultraviolence. I think that divide highlights the movie’s tonal confusion. It takes itself far too seriously to be just carnivalesque exploitation, but especially at the end, it presents too many batty, mondo moments to be taken completely seriously.

The idea of a cannibal family drama is pure exploitation. I get that they were going for something different here by focusing on the family unit and interpersonal drama instead of violence and horror. However, I would argue that there are plenty of exploitation movies that have great dramatic arcs without being so self-conscious about it. The movie’s conclusion solidifies We Are What We Are’s roots in exploitation cinema. The final beat of the movie plays out as a sort of “gotcha” twist. If only the entire movie had embraced that attitude my recommendation would be much more enthusiastic.

Magic Moment: Return of the hookers.

-Ben