FRIGHTFEST 2010 REVIEW: BY Ian Loring

Continuing our extensive coverage from Frightfest is this review of Mexican cannibals trying to survive film We Are What We Are.“Does for Cannibals what Let The Right One In did for Vampires”. How could you not be sold by that? I read that regarding We Are What We Are and knew straight away that I had to see it. Playing at the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes earlier this year, it arrived with a fair bit of buzz surrounding it and to say I was pumped was a bit of an understatement.

An old man staggers around a shopping mall before throwing up and dying. The patriarch of a family leaving 2 sons, a daughter and a wife behind, his death means more for them than just emotion and financial security as this man also provided his family with the bodies of strangers who they then ate for food and also as part of a long running family ritual to ensure survival. Oldest son Alfredo (Fransisco Barreiro) is reluctant to step up and take responsibility for his family despite sister Sabina’s (Paulina Gaitan) continued support while youngest member of the family Julian (Alan Chavez) is only too happy to lead the family but his increasingly violent and erratic behaviour only serve to increase tensions in the family more. Add to this their mother’s (Carmen Beato) fragile state of mind and you have a family who are on the verge of falling apart but must get it together to continue the ritual.

From the opening scene of this film, you know exactly what writer/director Jorge Michel Grau wants to say, it’s not heavy handed, it’s delicately played but the message is there for all to see. A shabbily dressed old man walks around a quiet, sterile shopping mall, touches a Mannequin and dies before having the body taken away, the area cleaned and re-opened in the space of 30 seconds. Society ignores anything not in the norm and only seeks to clean it up when it starts affecting the people on the whole, whether it be the inconvenience of a dead man in a shopping mall or in the extreme, whores and young children being cannibalised. Some could see how they get away with their activities for so long as a plot hole, but what Grau does with this is let us spend time not only with the family at the centre of the film, but also the people chasing them. The detectives involved in trying to hunt them down are painted as the lowest of the low, both in skill (they come across as Keystone Cops on more than one occasion) but also in the fact that the only reason they seem to be pursuing it is that they may get famous from it. It’s a headline and to them, that’s all that matters. In doing this, our loyalties are severely tested through the film, making it a far more challenging effort than it may have otherwise been.

You would never expect to relate to a family of cannibals but the sheer strength of the writing and performances really do make this an easy thing to do. This family is like any other, it’s just that they have to do extreme things to survive. The younger brother is sick of years of being trodden down by the perceived wisdom that the older son is the one who will lead and now that the time has come for a change to be made, he will fight to be the one to save the family. The daughter however has a close connection to the older brother and instead will do anything to help him, while the mother seems to resent everyone and everything around her. In a time of grief, this could be a situation applied to any family, but with a dynamic and atmosphere this charged, it becomes something else entirely. This is a story of not an indivual, but a whole unit and this really shines through. Later in the film, as things get more desperate, the family do attempt to come together, just as any other would and personal grudges have to be put to one side, and this is just another element that marks this film out as brutally honest and altogether a special film for it.

Grau’s direction is impeccable throughout, somehow using a Scope frame and yet creating a tense, increasingly claustrophobic world in which our leads become more and more desperate as the ticking clocks of their father’s business incessantly carry on in the background. A mixture of long takes and close up quick edits, the film creates a visual language which showcases both the melancholy of the family, but also the intense ferociousness with which this people will adopt in order to track, hunt and kill their prey, and feels tonally correct throughout.

As said earlier, the performances are also all exceptional. Fransisco Barreiro puts in a quiet, haunted performance as Alfredo, a young man who may not have been ever able to truly “lead” his family despite his best efforts unless he had a situation such as this and the way he comes to realise his responsibilities is both beautifully written and wonderfully played. His arc is the most satisfying of the film and rightly so as he is the one who has the largest cross to bear. Paulina Gaitan, who also impresses greatly in Sin Nombre plays Sabina as strong willed but also subtly manipulative, a world away from her character in the aforementioned film, and also gets a meaty arc to chew on, especially as the film reaches its climax (she’s also the focus of the film’s final shot, which by far and away gets my favourite closing shot of the festival). Alan Chavez also does well with a less complex role, but his anger and frustration scream out throughout though when he has to merge back into his family, the transition doesn’t feel forced, something that could have happened with a different actor.

We Are What We Are was one of the few films that split my fellow 35mm Heroes Jordan, Noel and myself. While they were relatively lukewarm to positive on it, We Are What We Are easily takes my joint number 1 spot of films of the festival, it being a film of originality, heart and real vision filled with pitch perfect performances and a family dynamic that despite the on the paper ridiculous sounding plotting, really works perfectly throughout. It’s a work of uncompromised filmmaking and deserves every success I hope comes to it.