We Are What We Are (Somos lo que hay)

“Mom’s looking for you.” Sabina (Paulina Gaitán) stands in shadows as she speaks, her face obscured further by long dark hair. Her brother, Alfredo (Francisco Barreiro), looks impatient, like he’s heard this before. Again, he has to head off the market to fill in for his father, missing after a night out. And again, he must take his younger brother Julián (Alan Chávez) with him. Sabina, he’s informed, will “stay here and fix the clocks.”

In We Are What We Are (Somos lo que hay), the clocks are the family business, after a fashion. At the market, Alfredo and Julián man their father’s stall, the table before them crowded with timepieces and mannequins’ hands, painted fingernails pointed up. Business has fallen behind, they discover, as customers come asking after watches that were supposed to be repaired left weeks ago. Julián taps his foot against the table leg, irritating his brother, another reminder that time is running out.

If the family dynamic here seems familiar — resentful children, demanding mom, absent father — the particular tensions in We Are What We Are are rendered in terrifically evocative images. Whether arguments give way to frustrated silence or frankly horrific violence, the camera ensures that nearly every moment is mesmerizing, dark, certainly, but also allusive. It’s not the only the family’s increasing focus on their unnamed but plainly grisly “ritual” that bothers you, it’s the regular world around them, from escalators to subway stations to the market filled with vendors and shoppers.

You know from the first three scenes of Jorge Michel Grau’s movie that the father (Humberto Yáñez) is dead. He staggers to a gagging, paroxysmal end, puking blood on a polished mall floor. The very first shot reveals the film’s sense of grim humor as well as its attention to detail: he makes his way to a stationary camera, the moving, gleaming, Dawn -f the Deadish escalator rail multiply reflected in glass, his figure slumped against it. When he falls, at last, the camera changes angle, from alongside his pained face to a shot from far above, through more glass, the ceiling, as janitors remove the body and also start mopping: no CSI team or investigation here, just clean-up and commerce.

When the coroner discovers an undigested human finger inside the dead man’s stomach, you’re only partly prepared for the kids’ reaction to their loss. They’re less concerned with their father’s suffering than with their immediate dilemma, as they need to “get something for tomorrow.” That is, they need a body to eat.

This won’t be a surprise for most viewers: if you’ve heard anything about We Are What We Are, you’ve heard it’s “the movie about Mexican cannibals.” And really, the eating, however awful the thought of it, is hardly the film’s focus. It is instead interested in the family’s reckoning with their disrupted habit, their emerging frustrations, the secrets that come roaring into view — however darkly shadowed that view remains. The mother, Patricia (Carmen Beato), doesn’t so much mourn her dead husband as she rages. His addiction to whores, she says, has finally killed him, the collective disease of these “bitches” a sign of all manner of decay — urban and moral and vaguely philosophical. The children, Sabina in particular, are more focused on survival. She sends her brothers out to bring back food, and not just a body, but a victim to be killed in the basement, surrounded by candles and cut carefully and meaningfully.

Sabina’s sense of urgency drives the action, as she alternately murmurs and directs her brothers to “carry on.” Their motives are increasingly unclear, as Alfredo sets off in what seems a search for self-identity and Julián acts out outrageously and brutally, eager to attack a series of victims, bearing down on a flock of homeless children under a highway overpass, mauling a prostitute they’ve dragged home and tied to a table, ready enough to batter a “faggot” Alfredo brings home. If the ritual — whatever it is, as it remains unexplained — was once a means to control and order, now it’s lost to roiling emotions, the family’s disarray inflicted on individuals usually ignored by the society they supposedly inhabit.

Even as a pair of veteran homicide detectives amble through clues and head in the family’s direction, the inevitable end seems beside the point. The family has gone about its business for years, their victims apparently unmissed. Their low-key affect makes them unlike other serial killing units who might come to mind (say, the family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and the fact that their time is ending seems an accident, not a moral consequence.

Even as Patricia comes to an explicitly moralized finish, the imagery is more compelling than any lesson you might decipher (she learns nothing). Restless and prowling, the camera repeatedly puts you in positions more predatory than observant. When Alfredo and Julián leave home for work, the frame moves with and then past them, along the street and then up over the scaffolding and canvases that make up the market: it’s one of those showy, artful, bending into abstraction shots that lets you know the city is a dangerous, enthralling, unfathomable place, but it’s simply gorgeous too. When they select the prostitute they mean to bring home, the camera remains inside the car with Alfredo as her torso and legs pass from window to window, her efforts to escape fragmented and awful.

The family’s own confrontations are equally perplexing, partly predictable and partly ludicrous. When Alfredo complains that he wants to stop, and blames mom for his pain (“Why did you make me this way?”), she offers only a myth of tradition and habit: “I did nothing. You were born this way.” But again, such consternations are made more pressing in how you see them: the siblings huddle in doorways and drive on dark streets, Sabina bathes in milky water and Patricia retreats to the back of frames, her kitchen small and cluttered, but not unclean. They’re monsters, as Patricia insists, trapped inside their own reflections, which also reflect the world around them.