With their bread-winner gone, the wild-eyed mother and her handsome adolescent brood are in a quandary: where to find their next meal, which they must consume in an obscure ritual by candlelight, or die. The deceased, a poor wretch who lived in abject misery, leaves behind a widow and three children, slowly revealed to be a family of cannibals who live on human flesh. When the autopsy turns up a woman’s manicured finger in his stomach, the coroner cynically comments to the police, “You’d be surprised how many people eat each other in this city.” Food for thought, indeed. This first feature, confidently directed by Jorge Michel Grau, is perhaps too dark and relentlessly humorless to find wide international audiences another limiting factor is the difficulty of identifying with any of the characters, who are played expressively but still remain abstract and alien, distant from the viewer.Ī man staggers down a city street and dies in front of a shopping mall.

Toying with gruesome violence and sexual taboos, the film is an interesting fusion of horror and psychodrama, buoyed by a striking teen cast filled with brooding hunger. Though less intriguing than the Swedish vampire tale, this Mexican film still has the chops to nibble a small piece out of the over-saturated vampire market. CANNES - “We Are What We Are,” the soberly told story of a family of hapless cannibals, falls into the category of quality horror that embraces titles like “Let the Right One In” and other modern genre-stretchers.

We are what we are movie review