We Are What We Are: The Mexican Cannibal-Family Original

The opening of We Are What We Are is the best thing in it, and it is one of the best openings in modern horror, and it contains the whole film.

A middle-aged man walks through a gleaming Mexico City shopping mall. He is filthy and out of place, and he pauses at a shop window full of mannequins in expensive clothes, and then he collapses. Black bile comes out of his mouth. He dies on the polished floor of a temple to consumption.

And the mall staff arrive with a mop.

That’s the shot. A cleaner with a bucket, sluicing away a dead man with the brisk competence of somebody dealing with a spillage, while the shoppers continue shopping and nobody calls anyone. Jorge Michel Grau’s 2010 debut, Somos lo que hay, has established its entire argument before anyone speaks, and it takes about ninety seconds.

A family with a vacancy

The dead man was a father. He leaves behind a wife, two sons and a daughter, in a cramped flat, in a household whose income comes from a watch-repair stall in a street market that is being squeezed out of existence.

He also leaves a vacancy, because he was the one who did the hunting. The family are cannibals. They perform a ritual. The ritual requires a person.

Grau’s masterstroke — and it’s a decision that separates this from every cannibal film before it — is that he never explains the ritual. There is no mythology. Nobody delivers a scene about the old country or the ancient covenant or what happens if the rite is missed. The family’s need is presented the way a household presents rent: an obligation with a deadline, understood by everyone at the table, discussed in terms of logistics. What the ritual is for is never on the agenda, because families do not interrogate the things they have always done. They just do them, badly, in a rush, while arguing about whose turn it is.

The children are the film. Alfredo is the eldest and inherits the responsibility along with a competence he does not possess; he is watchful, hesitant, and privately drawn to men in a household with no room for it. Julián is younger, violent, and reckless in the way of a boy who thinks force is a plan. Sabina, the daughter, is smarter than either of her brothers and is barred from the succession, and she spends the film applying pressure to that fact with a patience the boys never notice. The mother presides over the wreckage, furious about her husband in ways that predate his death.

Watch the family scenes as domestic drama with the horror muted and you’d have a perfectly good film about grief and inheritance in a poor household. That’s the trick. Grau built the monster movie on top of a kitchen-sink script, and the joins do not show.

The casting reinforces it. Grau uses faces that belong in a street market rather than on a poster, and he keeps the performances low and tired. Everyone in this flat is exhausted. They argue the way people argue when they have had the same argument for years and the outcome has already been decided by whoever earns. The father’s death registers as a logistical catastrophe well before it registers as grief, and the film lets that sit for a long, uncomfortable stretch — a household doing sums while a body is still warm somewhere across the city, unclaimed, in a municipal drawer.

The craft: indifference as a technique

Grau’s method is coldness applied evenly. His Mexico City is shot in blue-grey concrete and sodium, a working machine that processes people, and he films the family’s atrocities with exactly the same lens and lighting he gives the market stall and the flat. There’s no escalation of style when the violence arrives. The camera does not lean in.

That evenness is the argument. If the film shot the cannibalism as spectacle and the poverty as realism, it would be a film about monsters who happen to be poor. By refusing to change register, Grau makes the eating a household chore in a sequence of household chores — and the effect is that the viewer’s disgust keeps sliding off the ritual and landing on the flat, the stall, the debt, the city.

The police plot is the other half of the same idea. Two detectives pick up the case after the autopsy on the father turns up a human finger in his stomach, and Grau writes them as bored, corrupt, and mostly interested in what the case can do for them. They are the state, and they behave exactly like the mall cleaners: an institution processing a mess. When they finally converge on the family, it reads as sanitation.

There’s one more choice worth naming: the sound of the flat. Grau keeps the domestic acoustics tight and dry — no score under the family scenes, just the clatter of a small kitchen, traffic, a clock stall’s worth of ticking. The absence of music through the middle hour is what makes the ritual sequences unbearable when they come, because you have been sitting in a room with these people, at their volume, with nothing between you and them.

The real ancestor

The obvious one is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and the descent is exact rather than vague. Hooper’s 1974 film is about a family of slaughterhouse workers made redundant by industrial automation who go on doing the only work they know on the only livestock available. The cannibalism is a labour story. Grau took that reading — which took critics twenty years to properly articulate about Hooper — and built a film that starts from it. His family are an urban household with a trade, a stall and a shortfall, and the film treats their appetite as one more line in the accounts.

The other parent is Buñuel. Los Olvidados established in 1950 that a Mexican film could look at its own poor with a clinical eye and refuse both pity and uplift, and got called a national insult for its trouble. Grau’s mall cleaners are Buñuel’s grandchildren.

For the Mexican strand this film opened up, Tigers Are Not Afraid is the essential companion — Issa López doing to the street what Grau does to the flat, seven years later, with the same conviction that the horror in Mexico is a resourcing problem. And for the family-as-inherited-machine idea, the film’s clearest descendant in the English-speaking world is Hereditary, where a household also performs a rite nobody at the table chose and nobody can name. The ritual-community strand runs back further still, into the territory I’ve traced in folk horror’s long road: a group with a rite, a deadline, and a victim, doing what it has always done.

The case against

The film is better designed than it is directed. Grau’s ideas are superb and his execution in the middle act is loose — the hunting sequences meander, the police strand is under-served, and there are stretches where the film seems to be waiting for its own third act to become available.

The gay subtext around Alfredo is the biggest missed opportunity. It’s clearly load-bearing, it’s clearly connected to the succession question, and Grau touches it and retreats, so it ends up as a suggestion the film cannot afford to develop. A braver version of this picture is visible underneath the one that got made.

And the ending accelerates hard. After eighty minutes of grinding domestic realism, the last reel goes off like a firework, and the tonal snap costs the film some of the credibility it spent an hour buying.

Jim Mickle’s 2013 American remake is worth your time and is a genuinely different animal — Appalachian, rain-soaked, gender-flipped so the children are daughters, and far more conventionally beautiful. It’s a better-made film. Grau’s is the more dangerous one, because Mickle’s version relocates the horror into a specific weird family, and Grau’s keeps insisting the horror is the floor everyone is standing on.

Somos lo que hay streams and circulates on disc under its English title. Watch it, then rewatch the first ninety seconds, and count how many people step over the body.

Spoilers below

The hunts fail, repeatedly and pathetically, and that’s the film.

Alfredo cannot do it. Julián can, and does it wrong. Their first serious attempt targets street prostitutes, and it collapses into farce and then into something worse when the mother intervenes — her rage at the victim is transparently rage at her husband, who used these women, and the killing that follows is a marital argument conducted on a stranger’s body.

Alfredo’s own attempt is the film’s most honest sequence. He goes to a club, picks up a young man, brings him home, and for a few minutes there’s the ghost of a life he might have had. Julián kills the boy. The look Julián gives his brother afterwards contains the whole family: contempt, jealousy, and the knowledge that he has just destroyed the only thing Alfredo ever wanted, and that this is what brothers in this house do.

The ritual finally happens. Grau shoots it without ceremony, which is the last and cruellest joke — after all that, the rite is a family sitting down to eat.

Then the police arrive and the house comes apart. The brothers turn on each other properly, the mother is lost in the wreck, and the state’s intervention is as clumsy and indifferent as everything else the institutions in this film do. The boys die badly. Nobody is saved by anybody.

Sabina walks out. The daughter who was never allowed to inherit is the one still standing at the end, and the film’s closing movement makes clear that she has no intention of stopping — that the hunger is portable, that a household is only ever one competent survivor away from continuing, and that the city will not notice. Grau ends where he began: a mess, a floor, and somebody else’s mop.