Review of We Are What We Are (2010) by Robert L — 25 May 2011

To dispense with glib and unhelpful comparisons you may have heard about We Are What We Are: it's way more like The Threepenny Opera than any telenovela. And it resembles Let the Right One In only in that both are recent foreign horror films that are much smarter and more genuine and roundly affecting than the general mass of horror films. If WAWWA had come out ten years ago, they'd call it "Mexico's Ginger Snaps.".

And WAWWA is most definitely a horror film, despite some reviewers insistence on calling it another kind of movie "with trappings." Its impoverished Mexico City cannibal family may not be human at all, or under some sort of otherworldly curse, anyway, if taken at their word. (Hell, they may not even be cannibals: dunno if Grau is riffing on Bunuel or not, but...they never do manage to complete their religious rite and *eat.*).

The film flags a bit whenever it leaves the family for a subplot about inept, corrupt cops looking to make a name and a media bundle on the bizarre case, but for the most part deftly weaves its bloody horrors with the more realistic terrors of a wildly dysfunctional family whose last pin just got pulled.

We Are What We Are is that rarity: a horror film that is not at all entertaining, to anybody, on purpose. It's a cannibal movie with no cannibalism in it, and the kind of film that manages to find its greatest moments of despair in a stranger's kindly offered message: "You are alive." They just do not make enough horror movies like this one.