There's Something Special in the Salsa of We Are What We Are Explore the family dynamic of Mexico City's hardest workin' cannibals. By Jordan Hoffman

A man crawls outside a shopping center, vomits black liquid and drops dead. As passers-by ignore him, a janitorial staff quickly erases any trace of the incident. It is the striking opening to the very unique and very hard-to-pin-down film We Are What We Are.

One could, I suppose, pitch this as a story about a family of cannibals living in a current, urban setting, but the film's writer/director Jorge Michel Grau is enough of a trickster to keep you guessing about the film's true intent.

Our dead friend is the principle breadwinner - a clock and watch repairman, if you can handle the symbolism - for two sons, a daughter and a wife living in the junkyard outskirts of Mexico City. With Dad gone, someone has to step up and bring back material for "the Ritual."

It is implied that our family will die unless they feast upon flesh, but nothing supernatural is ever shown. . . and the behavior of the family is so different from what we expect in supernatural horror pics that I'm firmly of the belief that this isn't a group of hellish demons. They're just nuts.

The power dynamic fluctuates between the four survivors - a stern Mother, a Lady MacBeth-ish Sister, an unsure, gay (maybe?) older brother and a hothead younger brother. At issue is who should be getting the next meal, and who should be the next meal. Mom has a real bug up her ass about the easiest and most obvious target: prostitutes. It seems that Dad wouldn't just kidnap, kill and eat them, he had a habit of having sex with them, too, and that transgression has made a big mark on family policy.

A secondary story of two cops on the trail of the family (and not all that fazed by what they're doing) offers an intriguing look at crime and punishment in a hopeless city.

Most of We Are What We Are is shot at night, in ugly locations that had me hoping there was plenty of Purel on set. While there are moments of gore it is not primarily an action picture. What's key is that it achieves what nearly every low budget genre film wants: the thrills to engage the senses with enough intellect and insight to engage the mind.