Thursday, March 20, 2014

Cult-Movie Review: We Are What We Are (2013)


We Are What We Are (2013) is an intelligent, compelling, atmospheric, and likely controversial horror film.
Director Jim Mickle -- who made the extraordinary Stake Land (2010) -- suffuses his latest film with an elegiac feel, and the visuals are all muted and subdued.
In terms of its color canvas, We Are What We Are appears faded or washed out, and that’s an appropriate look given that the film concerns a landscape constantly besieged by flooding.  Every image looks like it is in danger of being washed away, and that’s a pretty good metaphor for human life itself.
In terms of theme, We Are What We Are serves, primarily, as an indictment of religion. On those grounds it may offend some viewers.
Specifically, the movie gazes at the way that religious belief can be utilized to justify almost any behavior, and also make draconian demands on its practitioners that, in this day and age, are not strictly necessary.
The central family in We Are What We Are, in particular, celebrates a “tradition” called Lamb’s Day that has been practiced, without deviation, without thought, and without question since 1741.
Once upon a time -- and under a very specific set of circumstances -- the practicing of this tradition made sense, and was even necessary for survival. 
In the present, however, the (brutal and monstrous…) practice of Lamb’s Day reveals the inertia and lassitude that dogmatic belief systems often rely upon.
In other words, acts are undertaken by adherents simply because they have always been undertaken, not because they are morally right, spiritually valuable, or even functional.
Tradition, then, substitutes for individual morality and responsibility in a very negative fashion.
At the same time that We Are What We Are exposes some aspects of religious belief as bankrupt, it serves simultaneously as a weird coming-of-age story.
Responsibility for Lamb’s Day preparations falls on a teenage girl, Rose (Julie Garner) who wants nothing to do with it, but feels pressure to conform to established practices.
Notably, the patriarch of the family does not sully his hands with this particular tradition, and so the film also involves (and derides) the patriarchal aspects of some religious practice. At the end of the film, the father finally evidences some sense of his own corruption, noting that Rose was once a “good girl” and that “it was me that made her bad.”
If you parse that too-little-too-late statement a bit, what the patriarch, Mr. Parker expresses, primarily, is his vanity; his arrogant belief that he knew what God wanted and that – miraculously -- God’s wants dovetailed precisely with his own.
A slow-build, slow-burn kind of horror film, but one that is punctuated by a gruesome and visceral pay-off, We Are What We Are makes its intellectual arguments with real verve and total commitment. 
Even if you disagree with this horror film’s conclusions about elements of religion and religious tradition, you can admire We Are What We Are for its coherence, consistency, and finally, the film’s humanity.


“It’s the first day of abstinence.”
In a small rural town where flooding is an on-going concern, the Parker family struggles to make its way in the world.
On a routine trip to the general store, however, the matriarch of the family, Alyce (Rush) dies unexpectedly, and her two daughters, Iris (Ambyr Childers) and Rose (Julia Garner) are asked by the local coroner, Doc Barrow (Michael Parks) to identify her corpse. They do so, and begin a period of mourning.
Iris and Rose’s father, Frank (Bill Sage), meanwhile, is suffering from tremors of unknown origin, and demands that -- in her mother’s absence -- Rose accept responsibility for the Parker tradition of “Lamb’s Day.” 
This feast is celebrated once every year, after a spell of fasting (or what the family calls “abstinence.”) 
At the same time, a high-school girl, Valerie Kimball, disappears without a trace.
Back at the Parker house, Rose is reluctant to adopt her mother’s holiday chore, as it involves a “monster” in the basement, but she undertakes her task with seriousness and purpose, even though she knows it is wrong. Rose reads from the Parker family’s diary -- going back to 1741 -- to gather her strength.
Soon, Doc Barrow discovers bones near a river that crosses Parker’s property. He suspects they are human bones, and their discovery re-awakens his own sense of loss. 
Some time ago, Barrow’s daughter also disappeared without a trace.
Barrow begins to believe that his child’s disappearance has something to do with the Parkers, who seem very strange and unfriendly.
Doc Barrow attempts to confirm his suspicion, but finds the Parkers celebrating their Lambs Day meal…


“God chose us to be this way.”
As you’ve probably figured out if you’ve read this far, Lamb’s Day in We Are What We involves cannibalism, and more. 
This holiday involves the process of killing, skinning, and then preparing for the consumption of living human beings. We learn the origin of the Parkers’ cannibalism from the family journal.
Back in 1741, the Parkers were settlers in wild, untamed territory when they ran out of food. The days and weeks went by, and desperation increased exponentially. Even as the family starved, the patriarch knew that his children had not yet seen “the whole of nature’s cruelty.” He couldn’t let them die.
As a last resort, the father and one another man went on a trip in search of supplies. The father returned to the family sometime later with a surplus of food…but without his traveling companion.
You can guess the rest. 
The patriarch had killed his fellow-traveler for the “fresh meat.” But perhaps more importantly, the patriarch excused his own murderous behavior, believing that “all is forgiven in the eyes of the Lord,” and that he and his family had been chosen by God “to be this way.”
In other words, the Parker Patriarch cloaked his moral trespass in holy robes, and turned that very trespass into the basis of a new form of worship or religion.
The violent act of murder was repeated (so as to canonize it, essentially and to spread the culpability for it to others as well…), and a liturgy was written to make murder and cannibalism sacrosanct.
It is with love that I do this. God’s will be done.”
Rinse and repeat. It makes the stabbing go over easier…


Lamb’s Day, however, transforms the Parkers into predators. They seek prey whom they can eat, and don’t treat that prey as fully human, just as in some religions, the unfaithful are considered less important, less righteous, and even less human.
The outsiders don’t “have” the true faith, and therefore will not be saved in the afterlife.
We see precisely the outcome of that kind of thinking in one stunning montage in We Are What We Are.
Specifically, Rose prepares a girl’s corpse for consumption. She cleans the body so it will be suitable as food. The images of her giving this corpse a bath, however, are inter-cut with images of solitary Doc Barrow at home, bathing his dog.
What’s missing from this picture?
The comfort of his family, the comfort his (dead) daughter might provide.
Why is it acceptable (and indeed righteous) that the Parkers took Barrow’s family away from him, and left him to this damnation of not-knowing her fate.  The cross-cutting montage reveals that for every Lamb’s Day valediction, there is also a human victim, and a victim’s family.
In the case of the Parkers’ religion is the thing that permits them to commit murder and still believe themselves righteous, and God’s chosen.  To the very end, Mr. Parker insists this is so.  He would rather die with his tradition intact than live life without it.  “We have kept our tradition and its purity,” he notes – whitewashing generations of murder – “and seek our reward in Heaven.”


One can make all kinds of rationalizations or arguments about what occurred in 1741. If I had been there, faced with the same situation, I might have done the same thing to save my wife and son.  But today, such a crime is archaic and unnecessary, and the practice of it is not just barbaric, but self-indulgent.  It is done by the Parkers because a “legend” has grown up suggesting that it is right to do it. 
And it is often easier to believe a legend than to determine your own new truth.
We Are What We Are’s conclusion offers both a victory and a loss for Mr. Parker. He teaches his girls too well, ironically, about the demands of his religion, and let’s just state that their application of Lambs Day protocol is…vigorously righteous.
The film also says much about sex roles in religion. Mr. Parker and his ancestors came up with the whole Lambs Day practice, but then they immediately handed it off to their women to execute the specifics (and the victims).  It is the women who kill, the women who clean, and the women who cook.  The men keep their hands clean.
Your mom would be proud,” Mr. Parker tells Rose, suggesting to his daughter that she has fulfilled her destiny and stepped into her mother’s shoes. If he showers her with enough paternal praise, she will believe that this is what she is supposed to do, that this is who she is supposed to be.
But, of course, what Mr. Parker has actually done is introduced his own child to murder for no good reason.
The flooding in the film -- which truly reaches Biblical proportions -- is an interesting thing. Given the film’s religious context, it might be interpreted as God’s punishment. The disease that the Parkers’ suffer from, though scientific in basis, might also be interpreted as a “punishment,” from a certain perspective, for their immorality.
But we ought to be careful about going that far.
We Are What We Are makes no direct implication of God’s anger, perhaps because the movie understands that if we take that leap, we are every bit as bad as Mr. Parker is. We would be assuming that God follows our opinion and idea of morality, and not his or her own. We would be substituting our wisdom for God’s, and that is the very thing that led the Parkers to commit murder and become cannibals.
One thing is for certain: this film gives the audience a lot to think about, even if the final moments might justify as, literally, overkill.
Some aspects of We Are What We Are also feel a bit warmed-over, it is true. The prion disease and the linkages it creates, forensically-speaking, come right out of a classic episode X-Files episode called “Our Town.” 
But the performances are nonetheless very good, and the porcelain, delicate Julie Garner is downright haunting.
Even the title, “We Are What We Are” expresses perfectly the film’s arguments about the inertia of some religious beliefs, and the intellectual laziness of some believers.
It doesn’t matter if what you believe is wrong, because you are what you are, and you’re just going to continue believing it. No matter what.

But down that path of mindless, rote repetition and dogmatic, unthinking tradition lies madness, says We Are What We Are, not salvation.

4 comments:

  1. That's funny, I actually just reviewed the original, Somos lo que hay by Jorge Michel Brau, on my blog! I'll be watching this one this weekend so that I can review and compare the two. This one does seem drastically different based on what you've written, however I skimmed large parts due to spoilers. It got rave reviews on the festival circuit, so I've been excited to view it for some time.

    I can't wait to check it out though, thanks for the review.

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    Replies
    1. Hi RG: I have not seen the original film, yet, but I understand they are quite different. I will check out your review!

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  2. This is a killer horror movie and one of the best movies I've seen in a while.

    I enjoyed seeing another great performance by Julia Garner, whom I enjoyed seeing in another excellent film, Electrick Children.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Troy,

      I agree that the film is quite good...and quite disturbing. The end was freaking and upsetting, for sure, and said something about the cycle of violence being connected to the cycle of tradition/religious worship. Yikes!

      Delete

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