We Are What We Are – DVD Review Posted by Jon Peters on Aug 1, 2011

While it is too easy to call We Are What We Are a Mexican Hills Have Eyes, the parallels are too similar to ignore. Dark, unforgiving, and beautifully shot, director Jorge Michel Grau paints a morbidly social tale of a poor family in the slums of Mexico City, but there’s little depth behind this pretty picture. There’s some thrills and chills, and they almost work in Grau’s big, broad strokes, but there’s little reason for the events after the credits roll, with a far too familiar twist at the end.
We Are What We Are is a cannibal family movie, minus the kookiness of that premise. Once this family loses their dad, they plan on carrying out the Ritual, but all goes to Hell and back, when an autopsy of their father, reveals a woman’s severed finger. The cops, sniffing potential money in the rights to this story, investigate. Within this set-up, the heart of the film is the deteriorating family connections between the mother and her sons. While Wes Craven kindly explored this notion back in the late 1970s with his cannibal family in The Hills Have Eyes, Grau manages to push the bonds of this family, their roles, and their expectations of some Ritual they keep blabbing about to the far extremes of their capacity. It’s like watching a chicken with its head cut off. Sooner or later, it’ll collapse.
Much like the family here. Yet there’s plenty of set-up with any real answers. Why are they cannibals? Because they are poor? If the mom recognizes their monster status as cannibals, why continue? Any correlation to the nature of capitalism’s fallout, is too loose to render the film depth. While the film is certainly moody, somewhat gory, and Grau is a gifted film-maker, much of We Are What We Are leaves the audience to confused without any payoff or sometimes, explanation to care beyond the prostitute gore.
The DVD:
Audio/Video: MPI Home Video offers up a really slick looking DVD. The details are high, and while it’s not the most colorful movie, the picture is vivid in its depiction of the reds and browns in the movie. The audio is equally as good too, no hisses, clean, and good subtitles.