Grau’s auspicious feature debut offers an unflinching portrait of modern society.
It’s a sullen effort, shot in muted ochre tones and only occasionally sparking to life through slashes of violence.
Surely cinema's first Mexican social-realist cannibal horror drama, it's grimly funny and at times horribly effective stuff. Ickily excellent.
Although We Are What We Are can be crude and almost banal, it has some good set pieces.
The film is like a supermarket sandwich, flavourless as you consume it while leaving a slightly nasty taste in the mouth afterwards.
An intestine-manglingly memorable film.
A failed attempt to bring arthouse credentials to horror.
With plenty of look-away-now moments and deadpan humour, he stays true to the horror rule book while putting his own quirky stamp on matters, not least in the grungy way (the director) lights the piece.
Imagine Fernando Meirelles (City of God) restyling The Hills Have Eyes and you have a little of the flavour (gulp) of this gruesome Mexican satire.
Pretentious, slow and deadly dull.
We Are What We Are falls between the arthouse and horror stools and is unlikely to sate fans of either.
Grau uses his rigorously grim scenario to mount a slightly studenty thesis about an underclass feeding on itself.
This is a film that's often more interesting to deconstruct than watch because Grau hasn't yet worked out how to marry his intellectual ideas with a throat-gripping storytelling style.
We Are What We Are is a film of considerable promise by a gifted movie-maker.
The trouble is that the basic premise is so risible, and the treatment so earnest, that nit-picking questions assail you.
It is what it is - not good enough.
General release. Check local listings for show times.
RSS feed of Cinema reviews