Review: We Are What We Are
Director Jim Mickle knows the shock value of consuming human flesh: within the first five minutes of his post-apocalyptic Stake Land (10), a creature snacks on a baby. His loose remake of Somos lo que hay, Jorge Michel Grau's 2010 movie about a Mexico City family of cannibals, is a more restrained effort that largely prioritizes dread over chaos. However, Mickle is careful to balance the tension with some truly stomach-churning set pieces.
Mickle and co-writer Nick Damici place the action in a rural area and re-cast the kin as strict followers of an ancestral rite, mandated by their Family Bible, to consume human flesh. The bickering brothers at the center of Grau’s film are now sisters Iris and Rose Parker (Ambyr Childers and Julia Garner), so inseparable that they sleep in the same bed along with their wide-eyed brother Rory (Jack Gore). When their mother dies unexpectedly, the girls are tasked with preparing the main course for the upcoming Lamb Day feast. While Somos lo que hay was filled with domestic squabbles and power struggles, the siblings in Mickle’s film are initially doting and attentive, which makes their participation in this ritual all the more discomforting.
The head of the household is Frank (Bill Sage), a zealot single-mindedly fixated on upholding his clan’s tradition. There’s a broader message here about the perils of blind faith and questioning religious authority, topics which the director also broached (though less subtly) in Stake Land. Flashbacks gloss over the Parker family history and how this ritual began; Frank seems motivated more by inertia rather than true faith. For him, the system is in place for a reason—it’s best not to get too existential when chowing down on other people. The precise nature of his delusions is left vague, and though Sage gives an imposing and menacing performance, he’s more bogeyman than misguided spiritualist.
The stormy Delaware setting, with its constant rainfall and grey skies, lends the film a fittingly Biblical air. When bones begin drifting downstream, the suspicious Doctor Barrow (Michael Parks) starts putting the pieces together. His sleuthing feels a bit belabored, considering that the viewer learns the specifics of the Parkers' diet before long. The film is at its strongest when grounded in the dynamics of the family, but in Parks’s defense, it’s hard to steal scenes away from a family of cannibals. The Parkers approach an Addams Family level of overt creepiness: colorless countenances, bags under their eyes, and outfits straight out of a Grant Wood painting. The anachronistic aesthetic adds to the foreboding tone, especially when the gang gathers around the dinner table, dressed to the nines.
We Are What We Are ultimately belongs to Childers and Garner, whose growing dread imbues the story with a much-needed human core. The sisters swing between vulnerable and vicious as they become increasingly uneasy about their heritage. Mickle does demonstrate that he knows what horror fans want to see, but in his effort to tell a tighter and more personal story, the film foregoes the morbid politicizing of the original. Somos lo que hay treated cannibalism with a sardonic bluntness: when a coroner finds a gnawed finger in the mouth of a cadaver, he remarks that plenty of people around the city eat each other. We Are What We Are, meanwhile, never minces words: this ritual is a grotesque affront that firmly establishes the Parkers as anomalies who are defiling their community. By the end, Mickle is true to his matter-of-fact title: he’s representing, without hesitation or irony, the sight of humans eating other humans. And it’s not a sight for those with weak stomachs.
