We Are What We Are (Friday, February 25, 2011) (9)

A few years ago I was really impressed by the Swedish film Let the Right One In, a vampire movie like I had never seen before then. The melancholy of modernity and the sadness and isolation of a vampire girl's life, come together for a sympathetic and interesting tale that would be considered a horror movie in most situations. But it is not really horror, it's the shell of the genre with the guts of an interesting think piece about being a kid, having hopes and desires and being in (puppy) love.

We Are What We Are is very similar to Let the Right One In both in style and look as well as what it is trying to convey emotionally. This is not a horror movie, really, but an interesting look at Mexican culture and the craziness of the urban setting (in one of the biggest cities in the world). Writer-director Jorge Michel Grau does a good job showing us an interesting view of modern life, but his script is too crowded with unnecessary junk to be as good as it could have been.

The film opens with an old man walking through a shopping mall and falling over dead. When the police do an autopsy on him they find inside his stomach a human finger (with painted finger nail). Back at his house his family is wondering where he is. They are cannibals and he has been out looking for food - that is, another person they can cut up to eat. Once they find out he is dead his teenage kids (two sons and a daughter) and his wife must go out to hunt for their next human meal. They have to figure out if they will continue to live the way they do or if they want to give it up and become 'normal' people.

They try to get prostitutes back to their place (which had always been a go-to method the father used), one son goes to a gay bar to pick up a kid to bring back to the house. At some point the police catch on to what's going on and try to stop it.

There is a lot of interesting information here about the roles of fathers and mothers in Mexican families and how the father never showed his kids how he did what he did with luring the people back their house to be killed. Once he's gone, the mother gains power and standing in the household and has to fight against her sons to keep that status. The cops move slowly but effectively through the investigation, ultimately finding out what is going on.

The overly complicated script is the worst part of this film. At some point there were about three possible victims in the house, the cops were on their way and there were a few prostitutes angry with what had happened to one of their prozzie friends earlier. Considering the basic story is simply that four people go out to find a person to kill, then kill that person and then the cops come, there are too many other layers that complicated the impact of the story. I appreciate the subtext of the son's homosexuality (is he really gay or does he just use it as a way to get young men to follow him home?), but as a plot tangent it is a bit unneeded. The story is paced so slowly, also, that it's hard to pay attention to what is going on, because it's rather dull through the first act and a half.

The look of the film is very nice and rather reminiscent of Let the Right One In. Every interior shot is filled with stuff and there's constant noise and commotion from the outside world. There are few pretty and easy shots in the film - almost everything is difficult and dirty. Just as George Romero used zombies to criticize our culture in his Living Dead movies, cannibals seem to have a symbolic meaning here. I'm interested in how they can represent the roles of consumerism, manufacturing and big business.

I particularly like that this movie uses the "cannibals-live-next-door-to-us" story as an entrance into an examination of modern culture. There is blood and violence here, but it's not really about this gore. It's about fairness and decency in society.

Stars: 2.5 of 4