“Oh, God, Mother! Blood! Blood!” Ryan Wells

What pleasant fluff! We have a Mexican family of five initially, and then down by one after the father finds himself victim of poisoning by a prostitute (who apparently wasn’t a fan of his charms), who for ritual’s sake enjoy gnawing on the bones of human victims brought to the pack by Dad. The father’s sudden demise and the subsequent aftermath sets the premise for Jorge Michel Grau’s feature debut, “We Are What We Are.” And while it opens with one of the finest sequences in recent cinematic memory, it closes with a forgettable, unfortunate whisper.

“We Are What We Are” works as a smorgasbord of horror plot devices: the ghoulish, frantic mother, the slightly incestuous sibling rivalry, urban violence, corrupt police officers, meta-homophobia, ticked-off trannies, the methodical persistence of ritual, the eventual exposure of madness. It’s all there. Frankly, what is not is the gore. Considering the premise there’s not much to shudder about which admittedly is a disappointment given what was promised.

Our heart of “We Are What We Are” is the mother, played with the exquisite intensity of a love starved cobra by Carmen Beato. After the death of the father, who appeared to do little more than “sleep with sluts” and make overtures at fixing watches at a local market stand, the mother dives into shock and then hatred particularly over the “ritual” that her children are so hell bent on carrying on with clockwork precision. As the mother lies comatose in her room, the teenage children—particularly the two males—divvy up the killing and it looks like the oldest brother (cold, cold Francisco Barreiro) is blessed and cursed as tasked to bring home the bacon, so to speak. The first attempt is wretchedly bad as they swoop in on some children hoping to snag a morsel. The second is more successful though this kind of meat is forbidden by the mother considering her deceased husband’s unhealthy relationship with it. Her children pay no heed to this, striking a defying decision against her; and soon after begin the steady decline and demise of the family through a series of reckless and stupid variations on the theme of the Hunt.

I mentioned the opening sequence and it’s a stunner. No words are mentioned as the camera sets on the top of an escalator and waits for the dying father (Humberto Yáñez) to reach the top. As he slumbers through the mall holding his stomach and gasping for life he’s ignored by all the other inhabitants in a haunting display of spectrality in the flesh. He’s suddenly enraptured by a pair of female mannequins in a shop window. And upon seeing his own reflection goes into a spastic fit coughing up black blood and finally collapsing into death. Count to five and you have the mall custodian crew swooping in to grab the dead man’s limbs and dragging him off camera, and a mop and bucket conveniently in line to make a pass at the blood. All traces of whatever just happened are erased with a kind of severe social disavowment that feels like a distant cousin to the final scene in “Chinatown.”

Speaking of unhealthy relationships with one’s parent, the most obvious influence seeping through “We Are What We Are” is “Psycho.” And while this is always a treat to see social outcasts suddenly bare their tentacles in public and snag a poor unsuspecting Marion Crane type in order to meet their demons there wasn’t as much dramatic flair that one should come to expect in a film released in 2011 that’s had 51 years to perfect the theme. Even down to the Detective Arbogast allusions and the sister’s obvious lack of a moral center at the film’s end – it’s all so very disappointingly pastiche and so swiftly, yet sloppily deployed. And sure, some of us may be in on the joke but there’s a point when how about giving us something black without the comedy, reliably always having to play the third wheel.

Regardless of the overt flaws in Grau’s shock tapestry, it’s still 90 minutes of delightful viewing, particularly when set alongside another recent, and dreadfully bad, genre offering “The Roommate.”