Original title: Somos lo que hay
Though it suffers from an uncertain tone and is rather ragged around the edges, Jorge Michel Grau’s debut feature is still a fascinating, politically committed film, heavily indebted to the disparate likes of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Claire Denis’ Trouble every Day (2001). Its intriguing opening finds a middle-aged man (Humberto Yáñez) stumbling through a pristine shopping mall, stopping off to peer into shop windows before collapsing, vomiting blood and dying. He leaves behind a fractious family – a widow, Patricia (Carmen Beato), two teenage sons Alfredo (Francisco Barreiro) and Julián (Alan Chávez) and adolescent daughter Sabina (Paulina Gaitan). They immediately go into a tail-spin following his death, not just because they’re going to miss him, but because he was the provider of the family’s rather restrictive diet – they only eat human flesh, consumed after a strange ritual that none of them really seem to fully understand.
What’s particularly disturbing about Grau’s vision of urban cannibalism is that it’s set in a poverty and injustice-riddled Mexico City where the consumption of human flesh is treated as just another inconvenience faced by the local authorities. When a woman’s undigested finger is discovered in the father’s stomach during an autopsy, the pathologist Tito (Giménez Cacho reprising his role from Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos (1993)) is unsurprised, telling the disinterested police that it’s a commonplace and that the deaths of the disappeared are officially based on rats.
The family, suddenly left without a provider, bicker about what to do next. Near the bottom of the city’s social pecking order, they decide to target those even lower down than themselves. While Alfredo and Julián fight over who’s to become the next alpha male, they bungle an attempt to snatch one of the city’s many abandoned and homeless children, hunting them like wild animals but failing miserably. When they bring home a prostitute, it only angers Patricia, still scalded by the late husband’s addiction to the city’s plentiful sex workers. And a pick-up in a gay bar simply brings out the family’s homophobia.
The family are portrayed as utterly useless throughout, torn apart by the death of their father who, it is implied, have forced cannibalism on his reluctant family. In the aftermath of his death they’re clueless as to how to proceed without him, not even sure that they understand why they’re even attempting to carry on a lifestyle they clearly have little affinity for. The father, a repairer and seller of clocks and watches, was clearly the linchpin that held the family together, running the family with the clockwork precision of his wares, and the vacuum his passing leaves is soon filled with teenage sibling rivalries, depression, panic and helplessness. Alfredo and Julián argue and fight constantly as they jockey for position as the family’s new leader and there’s a nicely underplayed irony in the fact that the most level-headed, resourceful and obvious of replacements, daughter Sabina, is never even considered for the role by the boys.
Grau never quite gets to grips with what We Are What We Are is meant to be, veering back and forth between horror, family drama and political satire, never quite managing to get all of the strands to mesh together. But it’s a brave film, full of righteous anger, shot through with a dour, claustrophobic tone that offers little room for humour or even hope. Even the final shot, after a violent climax that seals the fate of most of the family, suggests tat at least one of them hasn’t learnt anything and, unable to find any other way out of their cycle of poverty, is preparing to pick up where they left off. They don’t seem to understand why they’re making such a bad life decision – it seems that it’s the only life they’ve ever known and, in a world where they are pretty much the lowest of the low, no-one’s going to be there to help them break out of the cycle of violence.
In a city where the authorities are alternately uncaring and incompetent (the police are particularly useless and no-one seems to care that the poorest of the poor are turning on each other as a source of food), cannibalism is becoming a commonplace. It feels like We Are What We Are is a prequel to Soylent Green (1973), the population of Mexico taking the first steps towards a mass acceptance of breaking the greatest of all taboos, paving the way for industrialised mass consumption of human flesh as an answer to the problems of over-population, poverty and social injustice.
Though it never quite makes its mind up what it wants to be, We Are What We Are is a fascinating and thought-provoking film, one full of promise that Grau has, as of summer 2018, not quite fulfilled yet. It was impressive enough to warrant the almost inevitable remake though Jim Mickle’s We Are What We Are (2013) rings enough changes to make it worth your while. Indeed it keeps only the basic idea of a family of cannibals, changing the gender of just about every character and ultimately heading off down its own path.
The EOFFTV Review 