When Jonathan Swift asserted the logic of cannibalism in his satirical essay ?A Modest Proposal?, he suggested that the poor sell their children to the rich for food. In Jorge Michel Grau?s debut feature-length We Are What We Are the poor have already started eating themselves. This Mexican drama/horror focuses on a family whose principal dysfunction is the killing and eating of people.
The film opens with the family?s patriarch staring dead-eyed into the window of a department store, before falling down dead on the pavement. Street cleaners then move the body and clean the disgusting liquid that the man coughed up.
It's not a subtle statement on poverty and class but it's certainly one that is visually arresting. The man?s zombie-like appearance is at odds with the spotless surfaces of his consumerist surrounding, a juxtaposition familiar with Romero?s Dawn of the Dead.
The film then focuses on the man?s wife, two sons and daughter as they struggle to come to terms with their own roles, their relationships with each other and the small issue of how they are going to cope with the killing and eating of strangers now that daddy?s no longer bringing home the er? bacon. Mum is still angry at everyone for dad?s ?addiction? to prostitutes, an anger that she expresses at one point through a vicious saucepan-based attack on a hapless hooker.
It is the family politics which engage the audience. They are not monstrous in the same way as Leatherface?s similarly flesh-inclined clan in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but neither are you able to relate to them, each simply representing different roles within the family dynamic. The film?s trick is portraying the cannibals not as invincible predators but as victims. This is seen in their clumsy coming of age as hunters and social naifs, but also in their roles as personifications of the underclass.
Their world is a maze of shacks and alleyways completely at odds with the metropolitan areas, although it is a maze which all the characters are able to find their way around a little too easily. The film is filled with shots designed to conjure images of meat and hunting- their subtlety making them all the more effective. In one scene the oldest brother takes a bus surrounded by people holding on to the rails being jostled around like carcasses hung up in a butcher’s window.? Stylistically as well as Romero, the film also drops in a scene involving a coroner that is not so much inspired by, as nicked from fellow Mexican Guillermo Del Toro?s Cronos.
Where the film wastes its time is in its attempts to humanise the policemen whose paths eventually cross those of the family in the final act. The film may have made a stronger statement if they had remained faceless authority figures. These are minor complaints for a fascinating film that sets its tone so successfully and manages to say interesting things through its social realism while keeping you engaged with its atmosphere of approaching tragedy.
We Are What We Are is to buy on DVD and Blu-Ray from March 21st.
hecklerspray has three copies of We Are What We Are to give away! To win a copy just answer to following easy peasy question.
Which British ’90s indie-rock band were named after the word given to human flesh by Polynesian cannibals
1) The Longpigs
2) New Fast Automatic Daffodils
3) Mariah Carey
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