Family Troubles

Movie: We Are What We Are

My Rating: 3 stars

Now, here’s a super-bizarre little film.  I don’t know how the director ever thought up the idea for this story, unless it’s about a real phenomenon.  And hey, you never know these days, right?  This film is a story about a happy family of cannibals living in Mexico.  Well, they were happy until the patriarch falls down dead in the street one day, from what looks to me like some sort of advance-stage, brain-wasting, prion disease.  Not that I know what that looks like or anything, but all the disorientation, staggering about, and foaming at the mouth sounds a bit like the reports of mad cow disease that I’d heard.  And, we humans are probably chock full of all kinds of nasty chemicals and preservatives.  Well, dear, old dad was the guy who usually brought home the family’s latest victims.  And, he also seemed to be the head priest in their little cult—the one who ran the family’s weekly cannibalism “ritual.”  So, with him gone, the rest of these kids are really at a loss.  To make matters worse, he was the only one who seemed to be bringing in any sort of a paycheck.  Mom is an emotional wreck and won’t come out of her room.  Little sis is too small to wrangle a live captive (as the “ritual” requires).  And, the two sons are too busy arguing over who is the “man of the house” now.  Hey, this theme of a family in crisis is pretty common, what with the country’s economic woes of late.  But, this story adds a particularly morbid, and gruesome little twist to the whole thing.

This seems like it would be a straight-up horror film, but director Jorge Michel Grau actually takes an amusingly (alarmingly?) casual approach to this subject matter.  He presents what should be seen as a very extreme practice as pretty banal.  A pair of policemen is investigating the string of disappearances in the area, and the subject of cannibalism is raised when they read the autopsy report for the unidentified man who has collapsed and died in a public square.  Apparently the coroner found a human finger in his stomach.  Rather than being totally repelled by this news, the lead detective states that this phenomenon is actually pretty common.  “People eat each other every day in this town.”  Yikes!  We do see this family’s potential victims struggling to get away once they realize what is in store for them.  But, the family is never presented as the monsters you see in horror films. Sure, they might be a little crazy, but they’re certainly not psychopaths.  Maybe.  They could be merely a group of very poor people (with a really demented religion), struggling to get by.  The audience is even meant to sympathize with them a little.  It’s not that we’re supposed to approve of their cannibalism.  The religion, with its barbaric rituals, and the way the family members discuss eating human flesh, is all plenty repulsive.  But strangely, we don’t want them to just give up and die.  And, Grau seems to want us to root for them rather than the detective that is trying to track them down.  It’s a strange side of the story to be on.  The film isn’t all that dramatic or suspenseful.  The story is pretty straightforward, and doesn’t take very many twists or turns.  But, it does approach a pretty well-worn cinematic theme (the whole abduction and murder story) from a surprising, new angle.  And, that’s pretty worthwhile.