Playing with Tropes: We are What we Are

We Are What We Are, or Somos lo que Hay in the original Spanish, was a 2010 Mexican film directed by Jorge Michel Grau. It would be remade in 2013 by Jim Mickle, the director behind Stakeland and is ostensibly about cannibalism. In the case of the Mexican original, however, there is some definite playing with vampire tropes and it definitely plays homage to one vampire film and maybe a second also.

The film is mentioned in Undead Memory, in which Enrique Ajuria Ibarra recognises both the vampire and zombie tropes that underscore the film. To me this was richer in the former but the opening shots of the film actually drew to mind the latter.

the father

The referencing of the zombie genre is there as we see the patriarch (Humberto Yáñez) of the family the film details coming through a mall and up the escalator. The shuffling gait of the man is almost zombie like and the mall therefore reminds the viewer of Dawn of the Dead (1978). He becomes fascinated with a shop display – be it the dummies in the window or his own reflection that draws his attention is hard to tell. But he then dies – quickly his body is dragged away and the area cleaned.

at the market

The father was a watch repairer/seller on a market and as he has not come home the mother, Patricia (Carmen Beato), sends her sons – the elder Alfredo (Francisco Barreiro) and younger Julián (Alan Chávez) – to the market in his stead. Once there, a man demands his watch, saying its repair is overdue, and Julián attacks him, beating the man. The market manager comes over and says that the rent is three weeks late and kicks them off the market – Alfredo tries to cover for his brother with Patricia but she’ll hear none of it.

Paulina Gaitán as Sabina

Just then the sister, Sabina (Paulina Gaitán) comes in – clearly in shock – and states that their dad is dead (she has picked this up from the word around the mall). Patricia explodes in anger at hearing this, and later blames his addiction to whores for his death. There is a conversation between the children about “carrying on” and that they must get something for the next day. They search the house (for something but later we realise it was stocks of human flesh) but there is nothing left and Alfredo is told it is down to him. During the exchange Julián calls Alfredo a faggot. It is the next scene that directly references the vampire genre.

the Director and Tito

We cut to a morgue or funeral home. Working on the father’s corpse is Tito (Daniel Giménez Cacho) who speaks to the funeral director (Juan Carlos Colombo). These two characters are the same funeral director and mortician who appear in Guillermo Del Torro’s Cronos, indeed it is the same actors reprising the roles and the opening dialogue is the same as that used in Del Torro's film. This positions the film towards the genre, letting us know that it is playing with tropes (though there is nothing overtly supernatural about the film). The scene veers off from Cronos as two cops arrive, Detectives Owen (Jorge Zárate) and Octavio (Esteban Soberanes). Tito has performed an autopsy and found a finger with a painted nail in the father’s stomach. The cops take it but seem disinterested.

collecting blood

So, there is division amongst the family. Sabina is convinced that they must continue and Alfredo should take up the mantle of leader. Continue with what? A ritual slaughtering of a person, the butchering thereof and consumption. What this ritual consists of is left silent through the film but the family fear their end if they do not continue (as a family or individuals isn’t clear) and there is an indication that blessings will be bestowed upon them should they continue. This consumption of flesh for continuance is, of course, a vampiric trope.

the dead whore

Patricia seems to have an issue with Alfredo – whether it is to do with his sexuality or not isn’t clear. Julián does display homophobia and refuses to eat a gay guy, Gustavo (Miguel Ángel Hoppe), when Alfredo brings him home. Likewise, Patricia refuses to consume a prostitute the boys kidnap and beat, killing her instead and dumping her with the other whores as a warning to stay away from her boys. It is within the nuclear family that I saw overtones of another film, the Hamiltons.

insinuated incest

Whilst this does not have the coming of age character and the mother in this family is still alive, we do have the gay elder brother and then the brother and sister who are in (or, due to the subtlety of that part of the narrative, seem to be in) an incestuous relationship (whether this mirroring of the older film was deliberate or not I am not sure). The trope of sexuality that deviates from the heteronormative is one that the genre does often play with. So be it homosexuality, sex addiction (with the whores), casual sex with strangers (used by Patricia to lure a victim) or incest – the whole family queers the nuclear family and the hetro-monogamous view of sex.

a victim

There is a motif of time as well – beyond the time limit for the ritual, the house is full of clocks (which Sabina is expected to caretake) and at one point the soundtrack is dominated by a host of clocks ticking. This felt, immediately, like another homage to del Toro who does have a clockwork motif through some of his work and, of course, the cronos device was clockwork with a living creature at its heart. Chronos is the personification of time and the cronos device allowed its wearer/victim to step out of time and become physically frozen in time as a vampire.

bathing

We Are What We Are is not what you would call a ray of sunshine but it is a fascinating film. It is also one that embeds vampiric tropes at its heart (where the remake was a fairly straight cannibal text). Yes, these are cannibals (as far as we can see) but there is a compulsion to consume, a need that sits at the heart of the family. And, after all, if they drank blood rather than consumed flesh… well, what is blood drinking but a form of cannibalism. The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK